Wingmate
An airport social app for people stuck at the same gate. No faces until both people agree. Seat numbers stay private. Profiles disappear when you land. Bernhard designed it and builds all of it himself: backend, AI, iPhone app, tests and infrastructure.
Real app · recorded live · 28 sec
Latest update · 19 Sep 2026
Latest release
Four releases in two days, covering design updates, subscriptions, referrals and privacy controls.
New W8 logo and loader, departure-board yellow, rounder type, and a liquid-glass tab bar in six languages.
Filter the terminal by age (with a deal-breaker option), destination and intentions. Filters are saved to your account.
€4.99 a month with a 7-day free trial, cancel in the app, and renewal checks. Terms and Privacy were rewritten to match.
Invite a friend and you both get 30 days of Pro once they finish sign-up. Annual limits help reduce abuse.
Travellers in a terminal vote on how long security took, and everyone sees the live count.
Flight numbers are only visible to people on the same flight. A "Show my flight" switch hides it completely.
The product
Three rules the whole app is built around
A dating app loses trust the moment a photo or a seat number reaches the wrong person. So these rules live in one module, and the tests check every one of them.
Mutual reveal
You browse anonymously. A face only shows once both people have chosen to reveal.
Seat & flight privacy
Seat numbers stay hidden until both people agree. Flight numbers are only shown to people on the same flight.
Gone after landing
Trip data expires when the flight lands. It's designed to end at the gate.
Engineering
What's under the hood
Offline chat
People keep chatting in airplane mode
A custom Swift plugin connects matched travellers phone to phone over Apple Multipeer Connectivity. Uses Curve25519 for key agreement and ChaChaPoly for end-to-end message encryption, with deduplication when offline messages sync after landing.
AI
Claude with a safety net
The Claude API suggests profile lines as schema-validated output. Requests are rate-limited, and a local fallback provides a profile suggestion if the model request fails.
Testing
Automated tests gate deployment
Real data
Type a flight number, and the trip fills itself in
A live flight-data API fills in the trip from a flight number. The airport list covers 189 airports worldwide, up from 45 in Europe.
Security
Self-directed security review
His own review covers rate limits and Google ID-token verification, with remaining findings tracked for remediation before the public beta.
Operations
Automated deployment and monitoring
Every push to main is tested and deployed to Fly.io automatically. Sentry monitors application errors and Litestream continuously backs up the database.
Next
What's next
Put the iPhone app in the hands of real travellers.
Move photos out of the user record before usage grows, with the tests already guarding the reveal rule.
Work through the open findings from the security review before opening to the public.