Calling, inside the walls
A call in Shoal can only happen between people who are already in a conversation — which means the walled garden applies to calls exactly as it does to messages. Your child can voice- or video-call the contacts you’ve approved, and nobody else. There’s no directory, no number they can be reached on, no way for a stranger to ring.
Calls are one-to-one. They work in any conversation your child already has, whether that’s someone inside your family or a friend in another family you’ve both approved through a connection.
Voice or video, from the same place
Either works, from the same conversation. A grandparent reads a bedtime story over video; two cousins talk on the walk home. On a shared family device, an incoming call rings the person who’s currently using it rather than buzzing every tablet in the house.
The same rules as messages
Calls aren’t a side door around your settings. If a child is outside their allowed hours, they can’t start or answer a call, the same way they can’t send a message. The schedule you set governs the whole app, calls included.
When a call ends — answered, missed or declined — a short note appears in the conversation, with how long it lasted. That record sits in the chat like any other message, so a family admin sees that a call happened as part of normal oversight. The live call itself is between the two devices; we don’t record it.
Encrypted in transit
The audio and video flow directly between the two devices wherever the network allows, encrypted in transit. When a direct connection isn’t possible, the media is relayed — still encrypted — through a relay that passes the packets along without being able to read them.
What’s not here yet
Calls are one-to-one for now; group calls aren’t built yet. If that’s something your family would lean on, it’s worth knowing it’s on the list rather than in the product today.