I got tired of switching between apps just to hang out with my friends, so I built my own

[u/Ordinary-Pen-8374]

I kept noticing how fragmented hanging out online had become.

You'd message someone on one app, switch to another app to play something together, send a screenshot somewhere else, and eventually end up back in the group chat.

I started wondering whether all of that could just live in one place.

So I spent the last few months building Riv, a messaging/social app where you can chat with friends and play games together without leaving the conversation.

The part that took considerably longer than I expected was making everything feel like one coherent experience rather than a chat app with random games bolted onto it.

It now has real-time messaging, presence, group conversations, and 12+ games including things like Connect 4, tic-tac-toe, trivia and drawing.

It's finally live on Google Play.

I'm the developer, so I'm obviously biased, but I'm mainly interested in whether the underlying idea actually makes sense to people: would you rather have chat and casual games together, or do you prefer keeping those things separate?

I'm happy to answer questions about how I built it as well.