In beta · iPhone & Android
Social media for your actual friends.
No algorithm. No strangers. Just your people.
Free, no card required · Non-personalised ads only · Ad-free with Pro, $0.99/month
In beta · iPhone & Android
No algorithm. No strangers. Just your people.
Free, no card required · Non-personalised ads only · Ad-free with Pro, $0.99/month
Features
FRiENDS™ is built around a simple idea: a feed should only contain people you chose. Here's what that actually looks like.
01
Posts show up in the order they happened — newest first, every time. Nothing gets buried, boosted, or shown to you because it made someone else angry. Share your life in whatever form it takes: photos, video, audio, links, or just words.
02
Find your people by contact, by username, or by scanning a QR code in person. If someone is family, invite them into your Family feed so the people closest to you get their own space.
03
Groups for close friends, family, organizations, sororities and fraternities — or anything you and other people are into. Each one gets its own feed, its own chat, and its own calendar, so a circle stops being a thread you scroll past.
04
Somebody says “we should go” and it usually dies there. The trip planner gives that idea dates, a place, a budget and a list — visible to everyone invited, with an editor list so the right people can keep it current.
05
Create an event and everyone invited sees the same thing: when, where, what it is, and exactly who is coming. The host keeps the details right. Everyone else picks their own reminders.
06
Your calendar collects what matters: your own plans, events from every group you are in, and friends’ events when they share them publicly. Add any of it to your own calendar with one tap.
07
Direct messages with any friend, and a group thread for every Friend Group you are in. Your messages are private between you and the people in the chat — we don’t scan them to target ads, because we don’t target ads at all.
08
Decide how your page reads to your friends. Pick a theme that recolors the entire app, and set notifications so the app speaks up only when you want it to.
Also in the app
Gone in 24 hours, or save one to your profile to keep it there.
“Both” mode takes the front and back shot together and lays one into the corner of the other. Off by default.
Reply to a post by talking, instead of typing it out.
Pick your own lead times per event or as a default: 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week, up to five per event.
Posts, trips and events open the native share sheet, so they go to Messages, Mail or anything else you have installed.
1 friend earns 7 days, 3 earns 30, 5 earns 60, 10 earns 180. A friend counts once their account has lasted seven days, and earnings cap at 180 days a year.
FRiENDS Arcade
Three games — Snake, 8 Ball Pool and Pong — played against the people you already talk to, or against the computer when nobody is free.
HOW A GAME STARTS
Pick a game, pick who you are playing, pick the format. One button starts it, and it tells you what it is about to do. The invitation and the results land in that conversation.
The games
One player against the clock. Ten points an apple, and up to 32 people can take the same round.
You and a timer.
One against one, a shot at a time. Every shot saves, so you can leave the table and come back when it is your turn.
Your turn, whenever.
One against one, live, first to seven points. Rematch without leaving the screen.
Right now, both of you.
Keeping score
Nobody around?
A full frame against the computer, offline. No waiting on anyone.
Easy, Hard and Classic, each ranked on its own board, kept separate from your games against friends.
No opponent to wait for in the first place. Practice rounds run offline and stay unranked.
The arcade is part of Pro, at $0.99 a month. On a Free account you can still play — watch an ad, get a game.
Themes
A theme repaints the whole app — surfaces, icons, accents, buttons. Fourteen presets, six of them free and eight with Pro, plus a creator for building your own from a base, main and accent colour.
Start from a base, main and accent colour — or hit Random Theme until something clicks, then save it.
Bright ocean blues with soft sky surfaces.
Fresh fruit tones with creamy cards and leafy contrast.
Deep navy surfaces with brighter, higher-contrast text.
Dark pine greens with icy cyan and northern-glow contrast.
Soft coral warmth with clean cream panels.
A moody twilight palette with amber and rose highlights.
A smoky dark theme with warm copper highlights.
Neutral charcoal with crisp silver-blue contrast.
Black, white, and gray with classic high-contrast drama.
Daylight and Dusk are built on the Okabe–Ito palette, so accents stay distinguishable with deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia. A maximum-contrast High Contrast theme is there for low vision.
Scale type across the entire app to what is comfortable for you, independently of your device setting — layouts reflow instead of clipping.
By design
The dominant pattern in social software is the engagement-optimised feed: a recommendation system whose job is to predict what will hold your attention longest, and to keep serving it. FRiENDS does not have one. That is a structural choice, and here is what it actually means.
01
Only the people you added, newest first. When you have seen today, you are done — there is no recommended section waiting underneath to keep the scroll going.
02
Posts appear in the order they were made. We do not score them, boost them, or reorder them based on what is likely to hold your attention.
03
Friendships are mutual and by invitation. Nothing reaches your feed from someone you did not add yourself.
04
On a Free account: an ad after every three posts, a full-screen placeholder between every third friend’s stories, and a banner by the tab bar. None of them are targeted, none of them reorder your feed, and Pro removes all of them.
We are not going to tell you that an app can fix your relationship with your phone — nobody can honestly promise that. What we can tell you is how this one is built: there is no system inside FRiENDS whose purpose is to keep you here longer.
The difference
Pricing
Free is not a trial — every social feature is in it, supported by non-personalised ads. Pro is for people who want the ads gone and their photos uncompressed.
Free
$0 /forever
Everything social, ad-supported.
No card required.
Pro
$0.99 /month
Billed monthly. Cancel any time.
Pro Yearly Two months free
$9.99 /year
About two months free versus monthly.
Pro is an auto-renewing subscription billed through your App Store or Google Play account. It renews unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the period ends. Manage or cancel any time in your account settings.
How it works
1
Ask for an invite and we'll send one. No credit card, no trial, no upsell screen.
2
Invite the handful of people you actually talk to. Sort them into Friends and Family.
3
Post, chat, catch up. Nothing else gets in — because there's nothing else to let in.
Questions
Yes. Every feature that matters — your feed, friends, groups, calendars and chats — is free, supported by non-personalised ads. If you'd rather not see them, Pro is $0.99 a month or $9.99 a year. We will never charge you for access to your own friends.
On a Free account you'll see an ad in the feed after every three posts, a full-screen placeholder between every third friend's stories, and a banner by the tab bar. All of them are non-personalised: the ad is picked from the context of the screen you are on and, roughly, the country you are in — not from anything about you. Your posts, messages, friend list, photos, contacts and browsing history are never used to choose an ad, and no advertising profile is ever built about you. Ads never reorder your feed either — it stays strictly chronological.
Essentially one thing: your IP address, which every website and app you have ever opened already receives — it is how the internet knows where to send data back to. From it, an advertiser can infer a rough region, nothing more. What it does not get is your identity, your account, your posts, your messages, your contacts, or a record of what you do in the app. We do not sell your data, and we do not hand it to advertisers. If you would rather not see ads at all, Pro removes them for $0.99 a month.
No ads anywhere in the app, original-quality photos and videos instead of compressed 1080p, up to 10 items per post at 90 seconds each, audio clips, GIFs and file attachments, photo, GIF and voice-memo replies in comments, downloads from your feed, all fourteen themes plus a builder for your own, unlimited chat search, five profile links, the FRiENDS Arcade, and a Pro badge on your profile. It is $0.99 a month or $9.99 a year, and you can cancel any time without losing your account or your posts.
Yes — Snake, 8 Ball Pool and Pong, in the FRiENDS Arcade. You start a game from a conversation, and the invitation and results land in that conversation. There is no matchmaking and no global ranking: leaderboards are among your friends, or inside a single chat. If nobody is free, 8 Ball Pool and Pong both play against the computer. The arcade is part of Pro, and on a Free account you can watch an ad to get a game.
Only the people in the circle you posted to. There is no public feed, no discover tab, and no way for a stranger to land on your profile.
We store what's needed to run the app and nothing more. We don't sell it and we don't hand it to advertisers. It's encrypted in transit and at rest, and your messages are private between you and the people in the chat — we don't scan them to target ads, because we don't target ads at all. Full details are in the privacy policy.
No, and we won't imply otherwise. Messages are encrypted in transit and at rest, and they stay private between you and the people in the chat. What we can tell you plainly: we don't scan them to target ads, because we don't target ads at all.
You can set up an account and look around on your own, but FRiENDS™ is only fun with your people in it — so bring two or three along when you sign up.
FRiENDS™ is built for iPhone and Android, and it's in TestFlight beta today — not listed on the App Store or Google Play yet. Email alex@joinfriendsapp.com and we'll send you an invite. When the store listings go live, this page will say so.
Get the app
Built for iPhone and Android, in TestFlight beta now. Takes about a minute to set up.
Beta invites by emailalex@joinfriendsapp.com