Rami Maalouf, often seen with a QR-code taped to his shirt, hopes to win the battle against loneliness, come the 2025-26 school year.  

The UCalgary student’s app is designed to ease post-secondary students’ ability to make friends, with a goal of creating 100,000 student meetups in the first calendar year. 

“What we’re trying to do with Orbit, the name of our app, is to fight loneliness in university and help people and empower university students to find the people they want to surround themselves with,” Maalouf said.  

According to a survey done by Sodexo, which included 633 US undergraduate students, 84 per cent of students prioritized a friendly atmosphere when choosing a college. 

The survey also showed that 34 per cent of students have considered dropping out, with mental health being the most common reason, and that 38 per cent of students reported feeling lonely in 2024.  

A similar study done at Simon Fraser University and published in 2023, found that nearly 75 per cent of students asked felt lonely. 

Maalouf hopes his creation will eliminate the fear of rejection often felt when beginning new friendships and bring an overall friendlier environment to campuses across the world, beginning with his own, the University of Calgary. 

“We want to just break that resistance, break that barrier, to make it very easy, straightforward and effortless to find the right friendships and approach and meet up with these people,” he said.  

Upon signing up for Orbit, users must verify their age and a university given email address before continuing.  

“We’ll verify that their age is (at least) 16. We haven’t thought exactly about the mechanism for verification. We might just use government ID,” Maalouf said. 

Once verified, users create a brief profile of themselves, highlighting their main goals, interests and major, while linking to other platforms. 

“They would have access to their external links, like their Instagram, LinkedIn, just to verify the person, make sure that they’re not meeting up with a creep or a stranger,” Maalouf said. 

The fourth-year computer science student considered including features like live-location for the app, but decided against it in favour of ease of use. 

“There’s a lot of things that might be stopping people from using this app, whether it’s privacy concerns of location sharing or people knowing your current time and place,” Maalouf said. 

“(We want) to gain trust with the user and not make our app the kind of app that asks for a lot.” 

The app will allow users to create a meet-up post, specify the activities they’d like to do, and the preferred location and time. 

“We’re not asking for a lot. We’re just asking them to make a post,” he said. 

Users will also be able to see recently made posts and the poster’s profile. If interested, users can accept the meetup and interact directly with the poster to verify details like time and location.  

“They can request to meet up with you if they see that, ‘Oh, this guy seems to be very ambitious about building apps. Let’s meet up with this person, because I also love building apps,’” Maaloof said.  

App’s future may adapt AI 

Maalouf has considered utilizing tools like AI to connect users. 

“The AI kind of knows you and knows the other person and thinks, ‘oh, these two people would be very compatible.’ So it’s a facilitator between them,” he said. 

“But we’re still trying to test things out and get a validation for ideas, and hopefully by fall semester in September we will have the app fully ready to be launched and used.” 

Orbit’s September launch will begin with University of Calgary students as its first user base. Expanding the app to other schools like SAIT, MRU or Bow Valley College will all depend on number of users, number of meetups created and demand, according to Maalouf.  

“It could be two months in or two years in, depending on how successful our initial launch will be, and on the community itself,” he said.  

Maalouf may not be the only one to adapt his design to other schools. Throughout his process, he’s developed a community on Discord, where more than 100 members provide feedback and information. Maalouf openly shares the base code for the app in his Discord.

“In some way, I was thinking, ‘what if someone who is just as passionate about this problem of loneliness in university, what if they’re studying MRU right now or SAIT,’ they can just copy the code base and just launch the same thing in their university,” he said. 

Maalouf developed his community by engaging with students on campus and prompting them to scan the QR-code he often wears on his shirt. 

“Not a lot of people are scanning that QR code, but it does start up conversations with people like, ‘Oh, why are you wearing this paper on your stomach on your shirt?’ I’m more than willing to do the funkiest and craziest ways to market this app,” he said.  

Maalouf has spoken with restaurants on campus, with the hopes of placing links to the app on tables once launched. 

Orbit aside, Maalouf creates YouTube videos on campus. 

“I am generally making a lot of videos on campus where I give people dares or ask dares from people and just help people,” he said. 

The ultimate goal is to make universities, beginning with the U of C, feel more connected, according to Maalouf.