# The Cooper Story

December, 2022
## What is Cooper?

Cooper aims to be the easiest and simplest way for you to hang out with your friends while you play games on your iPhone or iPad. We want to make it seamless for friends to hang out, no matter where they are in the world, and play their favorite games like Call of Duty Mobile, Roblox, or Minecraft. Users can see when their friends are playing and hop into a voice chat with just a tap.

Here's a video of the user experience:
[https://vimeo.com/791985020/e41eb57dd5](https://vimeo.com/791985020/e41eb57dd5)

## The Team
### Marcus Palsson
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/m6GufVu.jpg" alt="marcus photo" width="200"/>

Marcus is originally from Sweden and moved to California for college at Stanford in 2014, which is where he met Josh when they became roommates their senior year. He majored in Mathematics and completed a M.S. in Computer Science at Stanford as well. Growing up, Marcus spent countless hours on Skype playing League of Legends with his friends, which gave him an appreciation for games' power in bringing people together. His favorite games are Warcraft III, Portal, and League of Legends, and his favorite gaming memory is getting his Stanford admission email while on Skype in the middle of a League of Legends game.

### Josh Singer
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/w3DQDSi.jpg" alt="josh photo" width="200"/>

Josh is from San Antonio, Texas, and also moved to California to attend Stanford, where he majored in Computer Science. An Apple fan from an early age, Josh got started developing iOS apps at 14 and since then has been perpetually excited about creating beautiful iOS apps that people love to use. Josh really fell in love with multiplayer gaming through his Xbox - every day after school, he'd come home, see who was online, and hop on a voice chat with them. His favorite games are Call of Duty MW2, Halo 3, and Grand Theft Auto V.

### Kevin Hartz
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/yPOuKj8.png" alt="kevin photo" width="200"/>

Kevin is the founder and former CEO of Eventbrite, which he co-founded with his wife Julia Hartz and Renaud Visage. He also founded the remittance company Xoom, which was acquired by Paypal. Kevin is a long-time angel investor who has been involved in the early stages of many groundbreaking products as one of the first investors in companies such as Airbnb, Paypal, and Pinterest. Kevin is co-founder and chairman of Cooper.

### Thomas Krajacic
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/Z2hY91p.jpg" alt="thomas photo" width="200"/>

Thomas works on the network stack and supporting infrastructure around Cooper. At university he worked with realtime networking for a research flight simulator, and implemented the link to its visual system. He's a contributor of the leading Swift on Server framework Vapor as well as other important Swift libraries such as Swift-NIO, and implemented a realtime sync solution in Swift based on Vapor. He loves building for iOS and macOS, and believes deeply in privacy-preserving applications.

### Paulo Faria
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/mR38b1l.png" alt="paulo photo" width="200"/>

Paulo works on the network stack and supporting testing infrastructure. He started programming while a teen in the late 90s, hacking a 2D fighting game engine to create a skateboarding game inspired by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, his favorite game at the time. Paulo is a founding member of the [Swift Server Workgroup](https://www.swift.org/sswg/) and the creator of the Zewo, Venice and GraphQLSwift projects. One of the highlights of his career was being invited to WWDC, alongside Chris Lattner, to mentor and talk about open-source Swift. Paulo profoundly values taking responsibility on the effects technology has, especially on the youth.

### Joannis Orlandos
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/M49Z1P3.png" alt="joannis photo" width="200"/>

Joannis works on the network stack. He is also a core member of the Vapor team, and he frequently contributes to other open source projects like NIOSSH. He enjoys writing for RayWenderlich for other iOS developers to learn and improve their craft.

### Adam Fowler
<img src="https://i.imgur.com/WNMjuj0.png" alt="adam photo" width="200"/>

Adam works on the network stack. Before Cooper, he was the former Technical Director (i.e. CTO) at Rockstar North, and there he made and/or led development of some of the most successful video games of all time, including Grand Theft Auto III, IV, and V. He has nearly 30 years experience building software and 22 years of those in the games industry. He now builds server solutions using the Swift programming language. He is a member of the [Swift Server Workgroup](https://www.swift.org/sswg/).

## Why we created Cooper
Some of our most cherished memories have been made in virtual worlds with our friends. Whether it was Skype on a computer or Xbox Live, we both felt how incredible shared digital activities can be in bringing friends together.

We graduated college and found it hard to stay in touch. We didn't have game consoles, but we both had iPhones, and one day we realized that we could now play some of our favorite games on our phones, together in real-time. So we found a time with some friends and played Call of Duty Mobile for 4 hours while on FaceTime in the background, and it was the longest we all had talked in months.

We were both amazed but also wondered why this wasn't a bigger thing. Everyone with an iPhone has an incredible gaming device in their pocket, yet using it to play with friends is not nearly as common as doing it on a console, the experience is very fragmented and could be so much better in so many ways. We wondered why that was and wanted to build something to help people do that.

Soon after that, COVID struck, and the need for digital spaces where people could hang out together became even more pressing. Students were at home isolated from their friends, and Among Us became the most downloaded app of 2020, largely from people wanting to stay in touch and play with their friends. They would cobble together a setup by using Zoom, or FaceTime calls playing on on their iPhones. This further motivated and inspired us to create something that would make this easier and more fun for people.

We experimented with a bunch of different things, learned a lot, and realized that a key component missing is just the ability to know when your friends are playing on their phones. If you have that piece of the puzzle you can unlock a lot of valuable experiences on mobile. Without this piece, the experience like entering a shared common room and never knowing if anyone else is there. With it, you feel like you're in the same space as your friends, and you have endless more ways of using the phone to share moments with them.

## How we did it

We use the `NEVPNManager` API to build an on-device, privacy-preserving way for you to passively share with your chosen friends when you're playing. Using a network stack we wrote and thoroughly tested, users can passively share when they play their favorite games with their friends utilizing on-device processing of network traffic.

## Why we did it in this way

We deeply care about user privacy. We could have implemented the game detection feature using an externally hosted VPN, but we decided not to because we want to be able to both embed privacy in the product as well as show our users that we do what we say. It took us 9 months instead of 9 days, but we believe it was well worth the effort.

You can read all about our commitments and values on privacy in our whitepaper "Cooper and Privacy" and our [Privacy Policy](https://d24xrgbzecwwpu.cloudfront.net/June+22nd+2022+privacy+policy+cooper.pdf).