Changelog
What's new in Shoal.
Each feature as it shipped, with a look at the app and why we built it the way we did. For help with a child's first phone, see the guides for parents.
June 2026
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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, so the text never leaves it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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May 2026
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Adding a child takes no email address
Setting up a child in Shoal is a short, three-step flow — no inbox, no username, and their everyday rules decided before they ever sign in.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 receiving the decrypted audio or the transcript.
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Hello from Shoal
Why we're building a private messaging app for families — and what's different about it.
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