A messaging app that doesn’t pretend everyone lives together
Family is plural for almost everyone, but for separated and co-parenting families, that plurality is everyday reality. The child who lives Monday to Wednesday with one parent and Thursday to Sunday with the other doesn’t have one family — they have two, and both are equally real.
Shoal models this directly. Children can be members of two families. Each family has its own admins, its own members, its own conversations, its own keys.
What stays separate
- Conversations. A message in Family A is invisible to anyone in Family B, and vice versa.
- Keys. Every family is encrypted independently. There’s no key in common, so there’s no possibility of crosstalk.
- Admins. The admins of one family don’t have any visibility into the other.
What stays connected
Your child. Their identity in Shoal is theirs — when they switch families in the app, they’re still the same person, with the same login or device. The two halves of their life are visible to them and only them.
A note on cross-family conversations
If the two parents need to talk to each other directly — about logistics, school, plans — that’s a conversation either side can establish across families. Each parent retains control over the conversations within their own family; the inter-family chat is its own thing, with its own key, and either side can mute or leave it.
What we don’t try to do
Shoal isn’t a custody management app. We don’t track time, we don’t manage handovers, we don’t generate reports. There are good apps for those things — Shoal is a messaging app, not a court-ready logbook. We do one thing carefully.