Airendipity: The app that took 10 days to win my heart

This review is a little over a week late. Well, not "late" per se, but about a week later than I had intended to write it. Normally this is something only my editor would need to know, but in the case of Airendipity, it's a good way to explain my experience with the app.

The concept behind Airendipity is that you write your feelings, quotes, questions or encouraging words in a short message and send it out to the world as a virtual paper airplane with complete anonymity. The main app screen features dozens of similar airplanes zooming all over the screen which you can capture, read, comment on and then send back into the fray. You can track the path of your messages and see what cities or countries it has landed in, which really helps to offer a human aspect to the whole experience.

Now, regarding the timeliness of my review (or lack thereof), I held off on penning my impressions of the app for about a week after first using it. To be honest, it didn't impress me at first. Most of the messages I read were famously overused quotes that I had seen a thousand times before, and my own messages didn't seem to really go anywhere other than Colorado (seriously, every single message I sent off ended up in Colorado after 24 hours, and refused to move).

At that point, I pretty much gave up. Writing about my rather unremarkable experience with Airendipity took a backseat to more pressing topics. Then, a few days ago, I pressed the Airendipity icon on accident when attempting to launch a different app I was reviewing. Rather than just close it out and get on with my life, I decided to check on the messages I had sent over a week earlier, and to my surprise, I spent the next half hour using the app.

My own paper airplanes had broken free of their Colorado chains and traveled the world while I was ignoring their very existence. Other Airendipity users had been reading my words and passing them on to others in South America, Hungary and even Saudi Arabia. Some of the readers "Loved" my posts by tapping the heart icon that appears on each note, while some simply read them and tossed them on to the next recipient.

There are some things that my brief hiatus didn't fix, however, including the insistence of many Airendipity users to snag quotes from famous individuals and pass them off as original, but that's a minor niggle in what is now a pleasant daily habit for me. Airendipity is free on the App Store, and I highly recommend you give it a look. In fact, give it several looks over the course of a week. You'll be happy you did.