After 33 years in UAE, expat creates app to keep fire of friendship burning: ‘Nobody forgets their best friend'

In all the metaphors and analogies surrounding friendships, the most enduring one is a bonfire in the middle of nowhere. It’s just you, your closest ones, and surrounded by glowing embers.

Sometimes, you don’t need to say much. The silence can keep you warm. And sometimes, enough is spoken around that fire.

You keep those embers alive.

And in a world where the embers can die out quickly, some want to keep the fire alive. And that’s what Sahil Hameed wishes to bring to people's notice.

After living in the UAE for over 33 years, he moved across the seas to Toronto and in the face of anxiety, conflict-ridden news, he decided to keep the flames alive by creating an app, named Ember. And that’s how, he could still stay close to people that he cares about.

Sitting in his home in Toronto, we co-ordinate wild time differences, where he shares the story of Ember. He doesn’t delve into the deep technicalities; Ember wasn’t meant to revolutionise technology and become another app that sends notifications.

It was just meant to bring loved ones closer to the fire.

Embers emerged from the ashes of a fading friendship. Recalling the reason that ultimately led him down the road to create the app, he says, “It was my best friend. When things got difficult between us, they slowly disappeared from my life,” he says.

As always, losing friendships is painful. It was difficult to sit with, and the loss was overwhelming. “I guess that stopped me from understanding it then.  I came to begin understanding it later, when I found myself on the other side of the same thing and became the one who had gone quiet because I was struggling to reach people after a period of time being depressed,” adds Sahil.

The walls around him kept getting higher, and soon, he was unsure of how to cross it. “Ember, came out of not wanting that to keep happening, or to the people that I love,” explains Sahil.

I look at the app through a friend’s phone. It’s only available on iOs at the moment. But I like what I see. I see little flames growing near a name.

Sahil breaks it down further on how it really works, “You add people by hand, one at a time. It takes about thirty seconds. You tap the plus on the hearth, type a name, and that is all the app needs. If you want, you can pull them in from your contacts, so their photo and number come along, and set how often staying in touch feels right for this person. Then they sit as an ember around the campfire, and most days nothing happens.”

He emphasises: The app doesn’t ask for your attention daily. You open it, when you think of someone, and the scene tells you at a glance who’s glowing, because you just got connected, and who’s cooling because life got busy. When an ember goes dim, one evening your phone shows a single line with their name and something in the spirit of 'could use a hello.'

Tap it and you're on their page, where you can call, message, or just note that they were on your mind. Once you connect and log the connection, the ember warms and the fire looks a little fuller again. And, there's a little reminder for you too. It's his Easter Egg, he says, with pride. For once, gentle reminders, are actually gentle.

Fire is an honest representation of how caring feels to Sahil. A relationship shouldn’t feel like a task with a due date, he says. “It’s more like warmth that needs tending. There weren’t any design iterations as I kept coming back to the image of a campfire with the people you care about as embers around it.”

Perhaps, inspired by the campfires he used to build in the deserts of the UAE. As he says, he pictured relationships, just like embers in the campfire. You tend them, and they flow. When you forget them, they cool. But, they never fade. They wait.

And that’s what mattered most to him: The app doesn’t scold you for letting it dim. It just remembers the embers are still there. “Everything in the design follows from that. It glows, it dims, and it waits with you.”

Each person has their own rhythm, which users can set when they add them: Weekly for a close friend, perhaps every couple of months for a cousin living abroad.

The ember gradually cools along that rhythm, moving through warm, cooling, dim and a last flicker. There is no algorithm deciding who matters. The only fuel required is attention.

There is also a lighter touch: ‘Had them on my mind’. It warms the ember a little but cannot bring it all the way back. Thinking about someone, after all, is not the same as calling them.

The dimming is slow and forgiving by design. An ember never fully goes out. It is simply a gentle pull back from warmth, an acknowledgement that people are often busy living lives almost designed to keep them busy. Compassion, care, and a comforting understanding, perhaps that's what the world needs.

 Ember does not read your messages or track your calls. It does not operate in the background, monitoring your relationships.

You mark what counts.  Sahil adds further, “That marking is half the point, because noticing was the thing I had lost. The other half is simpler: I don't believe in a surveillance layer over relationships, so there isn't one.”

Users can log four types of moments: “I reached out”, “we hung out”, “sent them a photo that reminded you of them” and “had them on my mind”.

You can attach a photo or note, allowing each relationship to develop its own timeline. It reads like a shoebox of keepsakes, rather than a spreadsheet, exactly what Sahil had intended.

Some might argue that manually logging interactions is inconvenient. Sahil sees that as the point. “People sometimes ask if hand-logging is a flaw. I think it's the feature. The ten seconds it takes to log "we hung out" is in itself a small act of noticing. Sure, the automation would probably make the app more cleaner. But I feel it would also make the whole thing mean less, and I would rather take the meaning.”

There is one convenience. Tapping Call or Message on someone's ember counts as “I reached out”, so users do not have to return to the app afterwards.

 But Ember takes your word for it. “It never checks that the call connected or the text sent, because checking is exactly the watching I refused to build.”

Sahil describes reaching out to someone you love after a long silence as feeling like “a mountain”. When you haven’t spoken to someone in a while and think about reaching out, “ugly little thoughts form”, as Sahil puts it.

“They must be too busy! I’ll just be bothering them. It's been so long now that it is going to be weird. What do I even say?! Each thought adds just that little bit of height, and before you know it there's a mountain sitting between you and a person you love.”

The longer the silence continues, the taller the mountain can become. “First, it's just a busy week, no big deal. Then suddenly it's been a month, and now reaching out means also explaining the gap, or rather that’s the story you tell yourself.”

 You begin imagining the other person taking your silence personally. Meanwhile, they may be sitting on the other side of the same mountain, worrying about you.

 Like most of us, Sahil has stood on both sides.

That, he says, is the kindness Ember tries to offer: catching the drift early, while the effort needed to take the first step is still small.

How often do we feel guilty for losing touch with our closest ones? We live in the 'should'ves, would'ves, and could'ves.'

But life does get in the way. And so, the app's reminders are deliberately restrained. There are no streaks or scores. It will not tell you that it has been 47 days since you last spoke to someone. There is no guilt.  “Gamify caring and you’ve accidentally turned love into a chore, and chores are what breed guilt. My laundry begging to be folded knows what I’m talking about,” he jokes.

Instead, the reminder is rare and small. One nudge in the evening. Never in the middle of your workday. Users can even mark quiet days when they do not want reminders. “Reminders are one ember per evening, not a pile of them so that you feel overwhelmed and if you ignore it, it doesn't sulk or repeat or escalate.”

The app says something once, softly. And, it doesn’t collect data. “There's no account, no sign-in, no server on my side. Because nothing leaves your phone.”

The app's privacy model is deliberately simple. “It is for the people you love, and those people are not data points. How often you call your sister is not a metric for me to sell. Your hesitation about whether to text someone on a Tuesday night does not need to be a signal, so it isn't.”

Building Ember has also taught Sahil something about his own relationships. “The inner circle rarely dims. Nobody forgets their best friend.”

It is the second ring that is more vulnerable to distance: the friend from the city you moved away from, the cousin you see only at weddings, the mentor who changed your path and may never know they did.

“The love is completely real, but life just never built an organic slot for it.”

 We don’t usually lose our closest friends. It’s the second ring of relationships, old friends, cousins, mentors and people we genuinely love, that fades because life gets in the way.