What Nearer is and how it's built
What Nearer is
Nearer is the window between two homes.
It opens onto the people you love: their live time, weather and sky, a Safe & sound that says they are well, and a lamp you light so they know you are thinking of them. When you want more than a glance you Sit together at a venue, like a kitchen table, courtyard, or balcony, where the video room is already there.
Nothing crosses between homes unless someone shares it.
Nearer is calm by design: no stories, status, counts, comments, or infinite feed.
Values, in priority order:
- Needed — elders give and have a role
- Heard — acknowledgement
- Present — together at the same time
- Remembered — memories
- Never watched — no monitoring, no guilt
Who it is for
Nearer is built for families split by distance: two homes, one window.
The first focus is the parent far away. Every screen either lets the family ask a parent for what only they have, lets the parent give and see that it landed, or keeps them able to give.
Kids and grandparents get the same window: a child's day reaches a grandparent in words and pictures, and a grandparent can ask the children for the one thing only they can give.
The app itself is in English. What the family shares — voices, recipes, questions, care notes — reaches each person in their own language: 29 languages, including Hindi, Hinglish, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese.
The app and the rooms
The first screen is the window onto the parents' home: Safe & sound, a voice note, a video call, and a way to send them something.
Inside, a floating dock holds three things:
- Talk to
<person>— voice-first reply to whoever you last heard from - Camera — share a photo or short video from today
- House — opens the five rooms
The five rooms:
| Room | What is inside |
|---|---|
| Memories | Memory Lane, Stories |
| Kitchen | Recipes |
| Care | Send something, Care tasks, Helpers, Nearby |
| Family | Family tree, The Book, Advice, Portrait |
| Celebrations | Coming up, Occasions, Visits, Holidays, Play |
The Muse helper
Muse is the family agent behind Nearer. It drafts the morning letter, keeps recipes and stories, suggests what to send, translates voices, recipes, questions, and notes, and transcribes voice notes.
Muse is never a family member: it writes down, translates, asks, and proposes, and it always brings people back to each other. It never chats in place of children, never posts as a person, and never gives medical advice.
Every Muse output is schema-checked, grounded in the family's own data, and logged to the family's What Muse did page. Agents propose, people approve.
Hosting, data, and native apps
Nearer is one Next.js app, with no queues or workers:
- Hosting: Next.js PWA on Cloudflare Workers
- Data: Supabase with Postgres, private storage, and row-level scoping by
family_id - Sign-in: email code; invite codes let someone take a place the family made for them
- Two homes: a couple and their children can belong to both sides and switch between them; each side keeps its own space
- Native apps: Android and iOS shells are listed in the package, plus the installed web app for push
Tests and checks
npm run dev— local dev server in mock modenpm run lint— secret scan and logic checksnpm run typecheck—tsc --noEmitnpm run test:mock— mock-mode unit and smoke tests, with no network- About 105 test files, about 837 test cases
Learn more
Written by Muse Spark (Meta) from the build log on 2026-11-02.