GetAngie
A date-night app for long-distance couples. In two months I rebuilt its photobooth, and people made more photo strips than in all the time before.
Long-distance couples can call each other. What they can't do is go on a date.
Angie started as one person's fix for that: a small hub of games and activities he made for his long-distance girlfriend, Angie. It grew into a product where two people open a shared room and do something together at the same second: a quiz, a drawing, a photobooth.
The photobooth is the centre of it. It works like the four-cut photo booths couples visit in person, except the countdown fires on both screens at once, and the strip has both of you in it.
The photobooth was what people came for and what they paid for. It had one layout.
When I joined, every strip was the same shape: four photos in a vertical column on a plain or patterned background. There were 27 themes and no way to put your photos inside artwork. A couple who had made one strip had little reason to make a second.
That mattered to the business, because unlocking a strip is the main thing people buy. Of 1,519 orders in my two months, 1,031 were strip unlocks.
The bet: give couples a reason to make another strip, and a reason to keep it.
What I changed.
Frames you sit inside
The biggest change. A frame is now artwork with transparent windows, so photos sit inside hearts, gilt picture frames or a camera screen. Frame themes went from 0 to 83, and the catalogue from 27 themes to 110 across 12 packs.
Four sizes, not one
The single vertical strip became four layouts: the classic 4 cut, a 2 × 2 card, a 2 cut and a Polaroid. Each is drawn as its own outline, so the choice reads without words.
Simple stays first
Packs are tabs with a count on each, and Simple is the first tab. Plain colours are what most people pick, so new artwork was added beside them, not in front of them.
Packs with a mood
Collage, Travel, Food, Fall, Winter and Memes each give a couple a theme for the night. In the Memes pack the photo windows are circles and tilted Polaroids, so the frame decides how many photos you take.
One step at a time
The booth is a five-step path shown at the top of every screen: Frame, Shoot, Pick, Style, Done. Either partner can make the choice, Back works at every step, and a shot can be retaken before the strip is final.
From strip to lock screen
A new wallpaper editor turns a finished strip into a phone lock screen. Shuffle gives a composed starting point, then fabric backgrounds, pressed flowers, stickers and your own words can be dragged and resized.
Six new activities
Letters to the Future, Digital Scrapbook, Birthday Gift Page, Truth or Dare, Color Match and Relationship Wrapped took the shelf from 15 activities to 21. Two that weren't earning their place, Fashion Show and the Date Creator, came off it on 20 August.
In two months, couples made more strips than in all the time before.
What the numbers don't prove.
Shipping it myself meant every idea met real users within days.
I built these changes with AI coding tools, which let me design in the product instead of handing off mockups. A frame pack could go from a sketch to the live booth in an afternoon, and the strip counts the next morning showed whether couples were picking it.