Email is not a requirement to talk to your family
Children — especially younger ones — don’t have email addresses. They shouldn’t need one to chat with their grandparents, their cousins, or their parents on the way home from school. Most messaging apps assume every account is rooted in an email or a phone number, which forces parents into awkward workarounds: fake email accounts, shared adult logins, devices that should be safe but aren’t.
Shoal takes a different default: an admin can add a child to the family without an email address. The child becomes a real member — they have a name, a face, conversations of their own — but no email, no password, no login flow.
How it works in practice
- From the Family → Members screen, an admin taps Add child and enters a name.
- The child is added to the family immediately. There’s no invitation email, no pairing code, no QR.
- On every family device in this family, that child now appears in the picker — a button grid you tap once to choose which child you are. From that moment they can send and receive messages.
A child added this way doesn’t have a sign-in of their own. They aren’t a separate account that could be phished, leaked, or used elsewhere on the internet. Their identity is just a row in the family’s member list — and removing them is one tap, with no orphan record left behind.
When the child is old enough for their own phone
The same child can later be given an email address and their own personal sign-in, without losing the family history. Their messages, their conversations, their name in the family — all of it stays. They just gain a way to use Shoal on a device that isn’t a family device.
This means the “kid account that grew up” doesn’t have to mean starting over.
Why we built it this way
Forcing children to have an email or a phone number to message their own family is one of those quiet absurdities that the industry has normalised. We don’t think a six-year-old needs a digital footprint to say goodnight to grandma. So we made it possible for them not to have one — and made sure the path to a more grown-up account, when the time comes, is a straight line.
For the device side of this story — the shared phone or tablet that the kids actually pick up — see family devices.