Writing
Can an App Warn You Before a Friendship Goes Cold?
Yes. Relationship drift is the gap between how often you’re normally in touch with a specific person and how long it’s actually been since the last contact, and once that gap passes a threshold, it stops being a vague feeling and becomes a number an app can watch. Three months of silence means something completely different for a friend you used to see weekly than for one you already only heard from twice a year, so a useful warning has to be measured against that person’s own normal rhythm rather than against a single rule applied to everyone.
What would an app actually have to measure to catch this in time?
Two things, tracked per person rather than as a single average across everyone you know: how often contact normally happens with that specific friend, and how long it’s actually been since the last one. Robin Dunbar’s research on friendship maintenance backs the underlying idea that different relationships hold together on different amounts of contact, closer people needing to hear from you more often than people further out. But the actual number that matters is personal rather than universal: a friend who’s drifted three weeks past their own usual rhythm has crossed a real line, whatever that rhythm happens to be for the two of you. The same three weeks means nothing at all for someone you only ever hear from around the holidays. This is the calculation an app like Coppice is built to run for every person in someone’s network individually, rather than applying one flat number, Dunbar’s or anyone else’s, to everyone in their contacts.
How long is too long, exactly?
Long enough that it isn’t a guess. Dunbar has put a specific figure on the outer edge of it: about six months without contact is enough for someone to slide from a good friend down to a general acquaintance, in terms of both closeness and the kind of support you’d actually ask them for. That’s the real, named window the question is asking about, not a hypothetical one. An app that’s actually watching for drift doesn’t wait for six months to arrive before saying anything. It flags the gap while it’s still small enough to close with one message, which is the entire value of a warning over a diagnosis.
Is this just Dunbar’s averages applied automatically, or something more personal?
More personal, and that distinction matters. Dunbar’s numbers describe what’s typical across a population, useful for explaining why the feeling of drift exists at all, but no two friendships actually run on the same clock. A version of this worth having scores each relationship against its own normal rhythm rather than a fixed number borrowed from someone else’s friendships, so a friend you’ve always spoken to every few days gets flagged on a different timeline than one you’ve always heard from twice a year. That’s the actual mechanism behind the question: not a universal rule about fading, but a comparison against what’s normal for that one relationship, specifically.
What happens after the app actually flags someone?
It surfaces them, ideally well before the six-month window closes rather than after. A version of this worth having doesn’t just log the drift quietly; it puts the flagged person in front of the user as something to act on, the way a calendar surfaces an appointment instead of just recording that one happened. Coppice keeps a short daily list of who’s drifted furthest from their own usual rhythm and puts it in front of the user on exactly that basis. If we stop talking, how long before we’re not really friends anymore? goes further into what happens on the other side of that window, once the gap has actually closed a friendship rather than just widened it. Knowing the score isn’t the point. Reaching out before the window shuts is.
Common questions
Does the app know when a friendship has actually ended, not just gone quiet? No, and it isn’t trying to. It measures a gap against a rhythm, which is a proxy for drift, not a judgement about whether the friendship is over. Plenty of relationships survive long gaps and pick straight back up.
Is six months a hard cutoff where a friendship is officially lost? No. Dunbar’s six-month figure describes a typical shift in felt closeness, not a rule that fires on a specific day. It’s a useful outer bound for how much warning matters, not a deadline.
What’s the actual score Coppice shows, and where does it come from? It’s a drift measurement built from how far a relationship has moved from that specific person’s normal contact rhythm and how much context has been logged about them, surfaced as a short daily list of who’s worth reaching out to.
Sources
- TED Ideas, “How many close friends do most people have? The answer is …” (2024). ideas.ted.com
Coppice is an iPhone app that notices when someone you care about is drifting out of touch and nudges you at the right moment. Get it on the App Store.