Mad Buddy
When your friends are close, they glow.
A privacy-first proximity social app built to help people spend less time scrolling and more time connecting in real life.
Live product · Developer setup · Product invariants
What Mad Buddy does
Mad Buddy helps approved friends — Muddies — notice when they are nearby without exposing exact coordinates, street locations, raw distances, GPS accuracy or location history.
The product combines lightweight proximity awareness with private social coordination: people can see nearby friends, signal what they are UpFor, make Plans, create Events and Groups, use Safe Arrival, share temporary Stories, and join local anonymous Conference conversations.
The product principle is simple: use technology to create more real-world connection, not more endless scrolling.
Core experiences
- Glow — privacy-safe proximity signals for approved friends.
- UpFor — show what you feel like doing and find Muddies who want in.
- Plans & Events — coordinate real-world meetups.
- Messages & Groups — private conversation and coordination.
- Safe Arrival — lightweight arrival check-ins with trusted Muddies.
- Stories — private photo sharing with a 12-hour lifetime.
- Conference — anonymous, radius-limited local conversations.
- Linkr — mutual social discovery without revealing one-sided interest.
- Badges, achievements and Buddy Score — lightweight trust and participation signals.
Privacy by design
Location is a product input, not a social feed.
Mad Buddy does not expose exact coordinates, numerical distance, GPS accuracy, geohashes, street-level location or location history to other users. Nearby experiences use coarse privacy-safe projections, and users can pause visibility with controls such as Ghost Mode.
The complete non-negotiable privacy and product rules live in docs/operations/PRODUCT-INVARIANTS.md.
Technology
| Area | Stack |
|---|
| Web | Next.js, React, TypeScript |
| Backend | Supabase Auth, PostgreSQL, RLS, RPCs, Realtime, Storage |
| Native | Capacitor with a bundled mobile SPA |
| Hosting | Vercel |
| Push | Web Push / VAPID and Firebase Cloud Messaging |
| Payments | Paystack for Mad Buddy Access |
| Quality | Vitest, ESLint, TypeScript, GitHub Actions |
The server and database remain authoritative for authentication, authorization, relationships, privacy boundaries, billing, Plans, Safe Arrival and notification membership. Client bundles never receive service-role credentials.
Local development
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
npm run dev
Open http://localhost:3000.
For local Supabase, staging and environment setup, use docs/operations/NEW-DEVELOPER-CHECKLIST.md and docs/operations/DATABASE-RUNBOOK.md.
Quality gates
npm run lint
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build
npm run preflight
CI independently validates web quality, production buildability, the mobile bundle, secret scanning and native/server boundary rules.
Repository guide
Historical handoffs and audits are retained under docs/archive/ rather than mixed into the active repository root.
Project status
Mad Buddy is under active development. The public repository is the engineering source of truth; production credentials, provider secrets, signing material and recovery codes are intentionally kept outside GitHub.
