Shoal can now place voice and video calls. Tap a contact, choose call or video, and it rings — on every device that person is signed in on, so a call to Grandad reaches him whether he’s at the laptop or holding the phone. It’s the natural next thing after voice notes: sometimes you don’t want to leave a message, you want to talk.
Peer-to-peer, not through us
The audio and video go directly between the two devices, encrypted in transit by the standard browsers use for real-time media. Our servers do the introductions — the signalling that lets two devices find each other and agree how to connect — but the call itself doesn’t route its picture and sound through us to be reassembled. The conversation is between the two ends.
Ringing the whole shoal
Getting a call to ring everywhere took more than it sounds. A person might be signed in on a phone, a tablet, and a laptop, and a call should announce itself on all of them and then settle onto whichever one answers. We rebuilt how devices listen so that an incoming call replays to each of a person’s devices, rings them together, and bows out gracefully on the rest once one picks up. A missed call turns into a friendly, plain-language notification rather than a cryptic alert.
Calls that match the caller
A call screen in Shoal isn’t one fixed thing. It adapts to the interface the person is using — the calmer skins get a calmer call screen, and a young child using the Reef interface gets big, obvious controls rather than a dense adult layout. When a child tries to call someone their family’s rules don’t allow, the app presents it as a call that simply didn’t connect — declined, not a frightening error box — because a guardrail shouldn’t feel like a telling-off.
Some honest limits
Calls are one-to-one for now; group calls aren’t here yet. Both people need to be online at the same time — a call isn’t a message that waits. And because the media goes device-to-device, awkward home networks occasionally need a relay in the middle to make the connection at all, and quality will follow whatever connection the two ends actually have. None of that changes who can see the call: it’s between the two of you.
How this fits with everything else
Calls live in the same conversations as everything else and obey the same family rules — active hours quiet them, admin oversight and the family’s allow-list govern who a child can reach. The calls feature page has the full description.
Try Shoal, ring someone, and tell us how it sounds at [email protected].