Not Having Sex With Your Cousin By Accident: There's An App For That

There are a few very specific problems that one deals with as a citizen of Iceland, most of them not even Bjork-related. In fact, the immediate threat is the phantom possibility of accidentally sleeping with one of your cousins.

Iceland is an isolated nation with a population of just 300,000, all of whom derive from the same family tree. Thus, according to the News of Iceland, “each and every Icelander that is in a relationship is dating a relative” — uh-oh. However, “in most cases those relations are distant.” Okay. But how are you supposed to know how distant a relation is if you meet one during a night out?

Three engineers have finally come up with a solution to this quandary by developing ÍslendigaApp, an app for smartphones that accesses the Íslendingabók genealogy database. Although the app does mostly consist of conventional search functions, it also very considerately has a built-in incest alarm. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the way that an incest alarm works is simple: if you meet a new acquaintance and would like to get better acquainted with him or her (in all the sex ways), you bump your phones together. If the two of you are “too related to take things any further,” the alarm sounds. Accordingly, the app’s tagline is “bump the app before you bump in bed.”

Icelanders have been very receptive to ÍslendigaApp, giving it 4.5/5 stars on the Google play app store — although it may have come too late for some. As one user commented, “if I would have had this app last year I probably wouldn’t have gone home with my cousin.” Probably.

“New App Prevents Icelanders from Sleeping With their Relatives” [News of Iceland]