Blog
Notes from the team.
Product news, security thinking, the occasional essay.
-
Read aloud, for the ones who can't yet
Shoal can now speak a message out loud — including with a warm, optional neural voice — and like our transcription, it all happens on the device, against text we never see.
Read more -
Photos and video
Send pictures and clips in Shoal — with an in-app camera, albums, and instant blurred placeholders — all encrypted the same way your messages are.
Read more -
Take a moment
A gentler cousin of moderation: instead of blocking a word, Shoal can quietly ask a child to pause and reconsider before they send. A speed bump, not a wall.
Read more -
Reef, Cove and Ocean: one app, three faces
A small child and a grandparent shouldn't be handed the same screen. Shoal now has three genuinely different interfaces over the same conversations.
Read more -
The family tablet
A single shared device that several children can use — and that doesn't spill one child's messages to whoever picks it up next. Here's how the family device works in Shoal.
Read more -
Adding a child takes no email address
Setting up a child in Shoal is a short, three-step flow that ends in a QR code — no inbox, no username, and their everyday rules decided before they ever sign in.
Read more -
Voice and video calls
You can now call and video-call within Shoal — peer-to-peer, ringing every device you're signed in on, and dressed to match whichever interface the person you're calling uses.
Read more -
Connections: letting two families talk
Two families can now share a conversation in Shoal — cousins, godparents, grandparents on both sides — without either family's encryption boundary giving way.
Read more -
Going offline gracefully
Shoal now reads, writes, and remembers when the connection drops — a local cache, an outbox, and honest message statuses, with your messages staying encrypted the whole way.
Read more -
Moderation that stays on the device
Shoal can block links and flag chosen words for younger members — and it does the checking where the message already is, on the device, not on our servers.
Read more -
A pass over the locks
Not a feature so much as a tightening: rate limits, request validation, a vetted token library, faster revocation, and a one-time-code sign-in option. The unglamorous work, written up plainly.
Read more -
Active hours, without the standoff
Families can now set the hours a child's account is active — a calm schedule rather than a kill switch, built into the same admin tools as everything else.
Read more -
Knowing it landed
Read receipts, reactions, and live unread counts are in Shoal — the small signals that make a conversation feel alive, built to the same encryption rules as the messages themselves.
Read more -
Notifications you can read, that we can't
Shoal now shows you who messaged and what they said, right in the notification — without our servers ever decrypting a word of it.
Read more -
Voice notes, with on-device transcription
You can now send voice notes in Shoal, and read them as text when listening isn't practical — without our servers ever seeing the audio or the transcript.
Read more -
Hello from Shoal
Why we're building a private messaging app for families — and what's different about it.
Read more