AntiGhost

💡 Inspiration

We all have people we care about but forget to reach out to — old friends, mentors, family members. Life gets busy, and it’s easy to unintentionally ghost people we genuinely want to stay connected with. Inspired by this emotional gap, and by a Harvard study showing that strong relationships are the top predictor of long-term happiness, we built AntiGhost to solve the quiet loneliness of modern life.

👀 What is Ghosting

Ghosting: the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.

📱 What AntiGhost does

AntiGhost is a smart, minimalist personal relationship manager (PRM). It helps users maintain meaningful relationships by:

Syncing phone and Google contacts
Analyzing email and calendar metadata to detect contact frequency
Sending personalized reminders when it’s time to reconnect
Using AI to generate context-aware conversation starters
Letting users cross off interactions like a satisfying to-do list

🔧 How we built AntiGhost

Frontend: React Native mobile app with a clean, minimalist UI
Backend: Typescript + Firebase + Convex for authentication, storage, and logic
APIs:
- Google People API for contacts
- Google Calendar + Gmail API for interaction history
- iOS Contacts access via react-native-contacts
AI Layer: Perplexity to generate personalized conversation topics and summarizations of prior interactions

🚧 Challenges we ran into

Balancing privacy and personalization, we wanted to ensure we only request read-only permissions and avoid accessing sensitive data
Integrating multiple APIs (Google Contacts, Gmail, Calendar, iOS Contacts) into one unified system
Prompt engineering for AI suggestions that feel helpful and human, not generic
Designing a UX that’s subtle and motivational

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

The idea and name
Proactively identifies contacts at risk of becoming "ghosted" relationships
Building a functional prototype that analyzes interaction patterns and edits contact details
Integrating Perplexity to generate smart, relevant conversation prompts
Designing an elegant, low-notification interface that encourages, not nags

📚 What we learned

Contact syncing across platforms is trickier than expected but feasible with the right APIs
This was our first project using Modern React Native with Expo, and we successfully integrated Firebase authentication
Many people genuinely want to stay in touch, they just need a nudge
Our target audience is definitely 20-25 year olds (our parents would not use this lol, we asked, they don't ghost)

🚀 What's next for AntiGhost

iOS Contact Sync Troubleshooting (Priority 2)
Calendar and multi-provider OAuth integration (Google, Apple, Meta, Outlook, etc.)
widget feature
Natural language logging of interactions (e.g., “Talked to Jake about trip”)
Public launch on App Store and Play Store???? maybe 👀