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. Each home can be its own family, with its own family admins, its own members, its own conversations and its own keys. A child with their own sign-in (an email address) can be a member of both families. A younger child without one is added by name in each home, so each home has its own profile for them.

Can one home see the other home’s chats?

No. Each home is its own family in Shoal, and they stay 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.
  • Family admins (usually parents, but could be any adult you trust). The family admins of one family don’t have any visibility into the other.

How does my child use both?

In one app either way. A child with their own sign-in switches between the two families on their own phone. A younger child taps their name on each home’s family device. The chats in one home stay out of sight of the other home’s admins — though, as everywhere in Shoal, each family’s admins can read the child’s chats in their own family.

Can the two parents message each other?

Yes. If the two parents need to talk to each other directly — about logistics, school, plans — either side can set up a Connection between the two families. Each parent keeps control over the conversations within their own family; the Connection is its own conversation, with its own key, and either side can end 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.