Korda
A Bluetooth cord between two phones. It tightens when you are near and snaps when the link is lost.
Every app that keeps track of your family is a tracker.
The category answers one question: where is this person right now. To answer it, an app needs continuous location, a server to send it to, and a history it keeps. Everyone in the family agrees to be followed so that one of them can be found.
Most of the time that is not the question being asked. In a mall, a market, or a terminal, the question is smaller and more urgent: is the person next to me still next to me. A map cannot answer that faster than turning your head can.
Korda answers only that. Two phones hold a Bluetooth link, and the link itself is the interface. It tightens, it slackens, and when it goes, you feel it go.
State and signal. Nothing else.
Pair once, in person
One phone shows a code, the other scans or types it, and the window closes after a minute. Both ends keep a key fingerprint you can read side by side and mark verified, so a tether can be checked rather than trusted.
Hold the link
A shared state machine tracks the connection and a smoothed signal strength. Those two values are the only things the interface receives, and signal becomes tension: taut and bright when near, slack and thinning as they drift.
Feel it break, then find them
When the link is lost the cord snaps and the screen goes dark. Seek turns whatever signal is left into warmer and colder. If the link is alive but you still cannot see each other, either phone can send a flare and both light up in that person’s color.
Privacy here is an architecture, not a policy page.
A promise not to misuse location is only as good as the company holding it. Korda makes the promise unnecessary by never obtaining the thing: no coordinates are read, so none are stored, none are transmitted, and there is no account, no sync, and no history to hand over.
Bluetooth range is short and it cannot tell direction, so the interface refuses to imply either. Proximity is a word rather than a number, there is no needle pointing anywhere, and a distance in meters is never shown. Every one of those is a limit stated honestly instead of dressed up.
One permission still has to be asked for, because Android attaches location permission to any Bluetooth scan. The app says so in plain words rather than burying it:
Android forces this on for any BLE scan. Korda never reads your location, we don’t even have the code for it.
PERMISSION SCREEN, VERBATIM
The cord is the screen.
Under the hood.
| Platform | Android, Jetpack Compose and Material 3 |
|---|---|
| Transport | Bluetooth Low Energy, phone to phone, no origin server |
| Shared core | Kotlin Multiplatform state machine driving the interface from one seam |
| Pairing | In-person enrollment with expiring codes and comparable key fingerprints |
| Interface | Signal strength rendered as tension, light and dark, reduced-motion safe |
| Access | Free, no account, nothing to subscribe to |
