WTF?! Have you ever marveled at the lightning speeds of modern communications and thought, "I wish this wasn't so fast"? Probably not, but for anyone who doesn't want to resort to posting letters, there's a new app that replicates the message-carrying speed of a carrier pigeon. Adding further realism to the whole thing, there's a small chance that your virtual bird will get lost or die while traveling to its destination, so don't send anything too important.
The iOS app Carrier Pidge is the work of Noah Iarrobino, who vibe coded it in about three weeks. Refreshingly, he admits that it's both "pointless" with "genuinely no practical use," but it's still interesting to discover how long it would take to deliver a message by pigeon power.
The app works by using GPS to measure the distance between a user's current location and where the receiving Carrier Pidge user is located.
The delivery time is based on how long it would take a pigeon flying at 110 mph to cover the distance. If the person happens to be very close, it'll get there in no time at all, but if both people live on opposite sides of the country, expect it to take almost a day to be delivered. Anything going overseas from the US is going to take even longer.
– Noah (@noah_bino) August 12, 2026
The speed of the pigeon does vary by around 25%, so your message could arrive quicker or slower than expected. Thankfully, there's a real-time flight tracker with a map that's shown within the app, so you can see where your feathered messenger is currently at and how long it will take before it reaches the destination.
Adding to the incredible excitement of watching a pigeon move across a map in real-time is the possibility of it never completing its journey. Pigeons, even the virtual kind, are still animals, so there's a 0.2% chance that yours will die en route, perhaps from virtual predators or hunters, or it could just get distracted and lost on the way.
Carrier Pidge is monetized by allowing users to expand their aviaries, adding up to 10 extra pigeons so they can send more than one bird simultaneously. It'll also come to Android, eventually.
If this all sounds familiar, a very similar app called Roost also launched around April. Iarrobino said he spoke with the creator and believes they both had similar ideas about the demand for a pigeon-based messaging service.