My friends won't download another app. What actually works
Most of them won't. What moves is a single link dropped into a chat that already exists, for a week that is already on everybody's calendar. Four people who ski together in February beat forty who might travel sometime. The other half of it is picking a tool that pays you something on trip one, with nobody else in it yet. Say all four ignore you. Your own trip still shows you the concerts and markets near where you are staying that week.
The objection is correct
Thirty-four apps a month is what the average phone got through in 2025, up 5.4 percent on the year before, and only about ten of those come open on a daily basis (Sensor Tower's State of the Mobile Market 2026, via GameDevReports, 30 January 2026). Your friends are already carrying the maximum number of icons they are willing to look at, and an app that shows them a blank screen until five of them have installed it does not get in ahead of the ten they already open every day.
The thread everyone lands on is r/signal, 19 January 2021, titled "Friends don't want to download another app". Thirty-nine comments. Not one tactic in them. "Nope, it is what it is, you can try to lead them but if they don't wanna follow, not much you can do." Another commenter, with less patience: "My approach is just to force their hands."
Someone in r/AppIdeas put the builder's half of it on 6 November 2025: "Apps like this are a nightmare to acquire for. Building this is the easy part ... Onboarding users will require a genius-level strategy and a small fortune in marketing spend". I have exactly the marketing budget he is describing, which is none. Four friends who already have a ski week booked are not an acquisition problem, though, and the strategy for them is one message with a date in it.
What makes a group move
WhatsApp announced a privacy policy change in January 2021. Signal's installs that month grew 5,001 percent year on year, to 50.6 million from 992,000 in January 2020 (Sensor Tower, May 2021). Across January to April its first-time downloads were up 1,192 percent while WhatsApp's fell 43 percent. Signal had been there the whole time, and most of the people who installed it that week had walked past it for years, right up until a policy notice inside a different app handed them a date to act on.
So put a date in your own ask. "We're all in Chamonix the week of 7 February, drop your dates in here so we don't miss each other" is a logistics message, and people answer logistics messages. "Try this app" has no date in it, so it sits in the chat until somebody scrolls past.
One link beats one invite each
On 28 October 2020 Signal put a whole group behind a single URL: "group links make it easy to get people into your group without having to add them 1-by-1." Admins "can also require admin approval for people trying to join your group." Then in February 2024, ten years into the product, they shipped usernames, described on the same blog as "a quick way to connect without sharing a phone number", with a QR code or link that points at one.
Apple Invites launched on 4 February 2025 and lets a guest answer with no account at all: "anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device". Partiful runs "on any browser, iPhone, and Android" and, as of September 2026, says "100% free, no paywalls", so a guest can answer from a browser tab without installing anything.
Groups in Will U Be There run off one link the same way. Make a group for the ski week, paste the link (willubethere.app/g/...) into that chat once, and anybody who joins and adds a trip appears in your matches when the city and the dates line up. Up to 200 people per group. Nobody inside a group sends a friend request to anybody, so joining is one link and the organiser never has to chase a second acceptance out of anyone.
The app has to be worth opening with nobody on it
Add a city and two dates to Will U Be There and it lists the concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying, inside those dates, with the friends tab still empty. On 6 September 2026 that database held over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries, drawn from more than 360 named sources: tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses, ticketing platforms. Plenty are free, and the free ones carry a flag.
So add your own trip before you paste the link. The message in the chat then carries a city and two dates rather than the name of an app.
When they still won't
Zenly had reached 35 million monthly active users when Snap closed it on 3 February 2023 (TechCrunch, 5 December 2022, and what people moved to). Facebook Nearby Friends closed on 31 May 2022 and Meta never shipped a replacement. Overlap, the trip-dates app Reddit used to recommend, was acquired by Pangea on 21 November 2025, and its App Store listing returns a 404 as of 6 September 2026 (the full story).
Fourteen people upvoted a Google Doc. That was the top-voted answer in r/TravelHacks on 31 August 2025 when somebody asked for an easy way to share an itinerary: "Shared Google Docs might work. Simple, accessible, no extra cost." Somebody in r/travel had already lived with that answer and reported back on 11 February 2023: "We have previously used a google sheet and various group chats - it was AWFUL." A sheet gets recommended because it costs nothing and everyone can already open one, and then somebody has to keep it current by hand every time a date moves. For the version that survives contact with a group of eight, I wrote up how to plan a group trip separately.
Don't nag. Send the group link once, when there is a week to send it for, and then leave it alone. TripSynq, a competitor doing the same trip-overlap job, answers this in its own FAQ, and as of September 2026 that page says what I would say: "Start small. Invite 3–5 friends who travel frequently. Once one overlap happens and you actually meet up because of it, those friends will tell others."
A commenter in r/digitalnomad, handed one of these apps as a recommendation on 23 December 2024, named the constraint: "It all depends on how many people you know actively use the app of course". Matching depends on that number and always will. The event list for your own trip does not, and it loads with an empty friends tab from the first city you add.
The Android half of the objection
Half the time "we don't need another app" means "we already have Find My", and that answer holds for exactly as long as every phone in the circle is an iPhone. One Pixel and it stops. Apple's page lists iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, AirPods and AirTag, and says Find My "requires iOS 14, iPadOS, or macOS Catalina or later and that your device is signed in to iCloud with your Apple Account". As of September 2026 there is no Android path. Someone in r/apps, November 2025: "My entire friend group uses Find My and I'm just... not there."
That person hears about the dinner afterwards. Check before you decide the circle is already sorted. For the wider list, I compared every app in this category and marked which ones are still alive.
Where the app I built fits
Will U Be There is free on iPhone and Android, with no ads, no in-app purchases and 17 languages. You set a home city and add trips, each one a city plus two dates. When a friend's trip lands within 100 km of yours and the dates touch, you both get a push notification carrying that city and those dates. The rest of your trip list stays invisible to everyone.
It never receives your live location. There is no GPS tracking and no real-time position, and it cannot draw a map of where anybody is standing right now, because the only things it holds are the cities and dates you typed in. That is also why it cannot replace Find My or Life360 for anyone who wants live tracking, and why it will not introduce you to strangers or plan your itinerary. The privacy page has the full list of what it stores.
Test it cheaply. One group named after a week that already exists in your calendar, one link in the chat, your own trip added. Two people join and you get a notification the first time their dates touch yours. If nobody joins, February's event list for that city is still sitting there when you open the trip. It is on the App Store and Google Play.