Middle Ground
Turns “dinner Friday?” into a plan that actually happens.
The problem
Group chats are great for talking and terrible for deciding — “dinner Friday?” turns into eleven messages, two maybes, and no booking.
What we built
Middle Ground turns the request into an invitation that has to be answered, checks it against your calendar without reading anything off your phone, and follows up afterwards to record whether the plan actually happened.
Middle Ground is an iPhone app for deciding things with other people. A request becomes a real invitation with six ways to answer — accept, decline, negotiate, reschedule, counter, or save — each one appending to a negotiation chain that drives the plan's state. It checks the proposed time against your calendar without that data ever leaving the device, lets both sides stake points on showing up, and asks afterwards whether the plan actually happened. That one answer feeds a reliability picture that is computed at read time, never stored, and visible only to the person it describes.
Highlights
- Six ways to answer a plan — accept, decline, negotiate, reschedule, counter, or save
- Calendar clash check that runs on-device; calendar data never leaves the phone
- Curated venue suggestions behind a pluggable reservation layer, ready for booking partners
- Offline-first: a local SwiftData cache merged with live Firestore, so writes queue and sync later
- 613 lines of Firestore security rules covered by 151 emulator tests on every push
- Reliability computed at read time and visible only to its owner — never stored, never compared
Inside the app
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