'This app became my best friend': Mourning is human. New grief apps want to 'optimise' it for you

People are turning to 'grief apps' to cope with the loss of family and friends. But the new world of death data raises troubling questions.

When Nitika's father passed away unexpectedly in 2023, she was a continent away from her support system. She had moved from India to Canada only a year prior, and was the first in her friend group to grapple with the death of a parent. "Living far away from my family and dealing with this massive loss was unbearable. I often felt lost and lonely," says Nitika, who asked to withhold her full name to protect her privacy.

Then she came across an Instagram post from the grief app Untangle, which offers "personalised bereavement support" through virtual support groups and moderated forums, boosted with built-in AI features. Nitika downloaded the app. At first, she just read other people's posts, drawing strength from how others' experiences mirrored her own. The similarities made her feel less alone, and she started posting. "I mustered the courage to write about my story, and since then this app became my best friend," Nitika says.

In soothingly serifed fonts and tasteful colour palettes that are muted but never sombre, Untangle and a number of other new "grief apps", including DayNew and Empathy, seek to remake mourning for the modern era. They have the potential to democratise access to support that can otherwise be hard to find. But in doing so, privacy experts say these apps are introducing corporate technology – and all the problems of the digital age – into the vulnerability of grief.

The apps come with libraries of content dedicated to grief and mental health. Users can connect with other mourners and share photos and stories of their loved ones. Some apps offer AI features such as journaling prompts, personalised to-do lists, and advice from chatbot A few include administrative checklists and expert consultations to manage the mountain of legal and financial paperwork that comes with death.

"It's optimised healing," says Karine Nissim, co-founder of DayNew, an app that provides support for loss and other traumatic life changes. "It's essentially your therapist, your best friend and your personal assistant in your pocket, helping you see the whole journey and create one workflow for it."

But mourning is messy. It doesn't typically hew to a workflow, and some argue it shouldn't.

Grief apps introduce a new wrinkle to the ongoing conversation about which experiences can and should be mediated by apps and the companies behind them. Like almost all other apps, grief apps collect personal data. In the past, you might lose a loved one and decide to speak with a therapist or join an online or in-person support group. You wouldn't have to worry how information you shared was being stored, or whether details about you were being tracked and sold by your psychologist or the group facilitator. Of course, if you couldn’t pay for therapy or find a group, you might also find yourself without support of any kind.

"I think the biggest draw is that we could potentially increase access to resources that people might not otherwise have," says Adrian Aguilera, a psychologist and professor at UC Berkeley who studies digital mental health interventions. The most important thing grief apps can provide is consistency and accessibility, he says, and our pre-existing comfort with virtual interfaces can make them a natural-feeling extension of real life. "Social connection is one of the best aspects of digital technologies", especially if you don't have access to a peer or care provider.

But how much of your privacy would you trade to technology companies for accessibility, support and connection? And if grief apps replace support systems that have historically been made up of humans, does the comfort still feel the same?

In the months after her mum died, Sofia Root, from Pennsylvania, US, felt a swirl of emotions: isolation, desperation, sorrow, anger, boredom. She was "not an online person, for the most part", Root says, but she joined a few Reddit communities based around loss. It helped a bit. "Every now and then you get that little dopamine rush when you read something you can relate to, and it just distracts you from your own issues for a minute."

Then, like Nitika, she was served an Instagram ad for Untangle. She gave the app a try, and soon noticed a comment from one of the community managers on another user's post. To Root, the comment sounded like it was written by artificial intelligence. "The idea that they might be using AI to produce something that's supposed to be about connecting with real people, it seemed a little fraudulent to me," Root says. "It goes back to that isolation."

Emily Cummin, chief executive of Untangle, recalls the incident. "I spoke about it with that community manager, because she was actually horrified that someone thought that she was an AI," Cummin says. "My belief is probably that people feel a bit uncomfortable that they'd be talking to an automated system when they're at a really vulnerable time."

But the liberal sprinkling of artificial intelligence throughout grief apps can introduce doubt. When amplified by the overwhelming cycle of grief, that doubt can be enough to do damage. Root reached out to the community manager, who assured her she hadn't used AI to draft the comment, but it was all too much. Feeling betrayed, Root deleted the app. "Interacting on this stupid little smartphone, with just your thumbs? It's not gonna replace what you lost, and it's only gonna take you so far," Root says.