CANYON_LOVE.APP

Canyon Love

An independent, 18+ dating app made for one campus, with stories instead of listings and a second side that only opens after dark.

canyonlove.com Read the case file

Type: Campus dating app
Role: Founder, Product, Brand & design direction, Engineering, Launch & marketing
Platform: iOS (Expo / React Native), Web, Staff console
Stack: Expo, React Native, React, TypeScript, Hono, Cloudflare Workers
Status: Waitlist live · App in private beta
Year: 2026

4apps in one repository: mobile, website, staff console, API

23database migrations, each additive

7 PM–2 AMthe After Dark window

32merged pull requests on main

Summary

Canyon Love is an original dating and social discovery app for students at Grand Canyon University: verified students only, profiles written as stories, and a separate night-time mode called After Dark.

Product vision

Two sides, one Canyon.

Most dating apps are built for a whole city and feel like it. Canyon Love is built for one campus. Everyone on it is a verified student, profiles read like short stories instead of spec sheets, and the tone is warmer than the category usually allows.

The second idea is time. During the day the app is Canyon Love. From 7 PM to 2 AM a second side opens, After Dark: a separate story seen only by people who step in too, and five likes a night so each one means something.

The app, day and night

Development builds with fictional seed profiles. Flip the switch to see the same app after dark.

After Dark introduction: There is more to you after dark. Discovery from 7 PM to 2 AM, five likes a night

After Dark discovery with a progress bar showing how much of the night is gone

Design direction

Golden hour, then velvet.

The identity is romantic without being saccharine: cream paper, plum ink, gold and coral accents, and an editorial serif for headlines. The mark is a butterfly whose wings are two faces turned toward each other, with a canyon river running between them. At night the same tokens invert into deep plum and soft light, so After Dark feels like the same place with the lights down.

Cream#FFF8F1
Ink#2A1633
Plum#8A2F74
Gold#8A5219
Coral#B03A48
Night#120A16
Night plum#F2A9D0
Night gold#F3C68E

Hex values are the app’s own theme tokens.

Key features

What’s inside

Trust
Verified students only
Sign-up runs on a one-time code sent to a campus student email, so only students get in.
Discover
Stories, not listings
Profiles are built around prompts and a short story. Full-screen discovery with likes, passes and a weekly Super Like.
Night
After Dark
A separate story and a separate deck from 7 PM to 2 AM, five likes a night, and conversations that don’t disappear at sunrise.
Connect
Live chat and voice
Real-time messaging over Durable Objects, plus short voice memos, with moderation built in.
Habit
Daily streak
A bonus like for each day in a row, with a staff kill switch.
Premium
Membership tiers
Canyon+, Canyon Gold and Canyon Elite, plus After Dark tiers, sold through native in-app purchase.
Safety
Zero tolerance, reviewed fast
Reports are reviewed within 24 hours. Staff moderate photos, voice and accounts from a protected console with an audit trail.
Launch
Waitlist and first wave
A public waitlist at canyonlove.com, admission in waves, and an in-app welcome for the first members.

Development highlights

One repository, four apps

Canyon Love is a TypeScript monorepo. Shared validation and product configuration live in one package, so the app, the website, the staff console and the API agree on every rule.

Separate preview and live environments, each with its own database and media bucket
Every deploy tagged with its commit, with a recorded rollback target
Playwright suites for the app, website, staff console and API

MobileExpo + React Native, Expo Router, native in-app purchases (RevenueCat)
WebsiteReact + Vite waitlist with a drag, pinch and rotate photo editor
Staff consoleRole-restricted moderation portal: photo and voice review, waitlist, insights, releases
APIHono on Cloudflare Workers, Zod validation, scheduled maintenance
RealtimeDurable Objects for chat, with revocation on sign-out
DataD1 (SQLite) with additive migrations, private R2 for media

Launch