Family that doesn’t fit in one country
Some families live the same week in three countries. Grandparents in one place, parents working in another, kids at boarding school somewhere else. The family chat needs to work across borders, time zones, and patchy hotel Wi-Fi.
Shoal is designed for this. There’s no SIM card, no phone number, no country-specific signup. Anywhere there’s an internet connection, Shoal works the same.
What this means in practice
- No roaming charges. Shoal runs over the internet. Your data plan, hotel Wi-Fi, café Wi-Fi — all the same to Shoal.
- No phone numbers required. Some apps insist on a phone number for sign-up, then break in interesting ways when you change country. Shoal sign-in is just an email.
- End-to-end encryption everywhere. Messages encrypted on a hotel network are still safe. The only thing the network sees is a stream of ciphertext between your device and Cloudflare’s edge.
- Multiple families, one account. If you have an extended family in two countries, you can keep a separate family for each side, and switch between them with a tap.
Privacy in places where it matters
When you’re travelling through countries with different attitudes to privacy, the model matters. Shoal’s encryption isn’t a feature toggle. We can’t be compelled to hand over message contents, because we don’t have them. The keys live on your device. The only thing on our servers is encrypted blobs we couldn’t read if we tried.
Push notifications across networks
Web push works almost universally. Whether you’re on a 4G connection in Buenos Aires, hotel Wi-Fi in Reykjavik, or your home broadband in London, notifications arrive within seconds.