EchoPost
“We wanted to make time feel tangible. Turns out, time didn’t want to cooperate.”
-The EchoPost Team
The Concept
EchoPost was a reflective experiment in digital time travel- an app designed to let users send messages to their future selves. Whether it was a letter of encouragement, a reminder of a forgotten dream, or simply a snapshot of an ordinary day, each message could be scheduled to reappear months or even years later.
The creators imagined it as an emotional time capsule for the modern age-blending nostalgia, journaling, and personal growth into a single experience. Users could record audio or video notes, attach photos, and choose a future delivery date. On that chosen day, a notification would appear, opening a message from the past-a digital echo across time.
EchoPost’s interface was minimalist and poetic: a black screen, a blinking cursor, and the gentle sound of static-as if writing through the airwaves. The app gained early attention for its introspective premise. One beta tester described it as “a quiet conversation with who I used to be”.
Why It Was Scrapped
EchoPost’s downfall was both technical and emotional.
On a practical level, time-delay messaging turned out to be far more fragile than expected. Messages got lost when users switched devices or deleted their accounts, and delayed notifications often failed to trigger. What began as a simple system quickly unraveled into a tangle of undelivered letters and frustrated users.
But even beyond the glitches, the app faced a deeper philosophical problem: people didn’t always want to hear from their past selves. Some found the experience haunting or uncomfortable-receiving reminders from someone they no longer recognized. Others opened old messages only to be reminded of goals they hadn’t met, relationships that had ended, or versions of themselves that felt painfully distant.
As engagement dropped, the developers realized that memory-once digitized- could feel less like nostalgia and more like a confrontation. The project was discontinued quietly, leaving thousands of unseent messages suspended forever in their servers-whispers from the past, waiting to be heard.