Letters to Loved Ones (LTL) is a family app for staying close to the people you love, in life and after loss. It combines daily reflection and shared prompts for living relationships with a gentle, non-performative memorial experience for the people who are gone. You don’t download LTL after someone dies; you’ve been using it with them for years, and it is there when you need it to be. This documentation site is a portfolio-level overview of the product vision, mechanics, and architecture.
Quick Links
- Product Vision — what LTL is, who it’s for, and the principles that govern every decision
- The Four Tracks — Personal, Pairings, Family Spaces, and Memorial Candles
- Death Transition System — the most delicate system: memorializing an account safely
- Architecture Overview — stack, data model, and offline-first sync
- Privacy and Security — encryption, row-level security, and the threat model
- Developer Guide — repository layout, tooling, and conventions
Key Facts
- What it is: a cross-platform mobile app for family connection and remembrance, organized around four interaction tracks.
- Stack: React Native + Expo (TypeScript strict), Supabase (Postgres, Auth, Storage, Realtime, Edge Functions), expo-sqlite with SQLCipher for offline, Zustand + TanStack Query, NativeWind.
- Status: Phase 1.9 — closing operational gaps before a Phase 2 closed beta. Phase 1 (Personal, Pairings, a Memorial Candle) and significant Phase 2 hardening have shipped.
- Origin: built in memory of Lisa C. Bowen; the design grew from a private space for one family into a product any family can use.
Source of Truth
The canonical design lives in the LTL repository (private). This wiki mirrors the public, portfolio-level shape of that design and intentionally omits any personal data, secrets, or implementation detail that should stay private.