The five on the front page are the ones parents ask first. Here they are again, with the rest.
Roughly four to ten. The child’s side is built for someone who cannot read yet. Large photo tiles, navigation by face, no menus, and the little text there is decorates rather than instructs. The grown-up side is an ordinary app for you.
No. A shared family tablet works, and each child gets a profile they pick by tapping their own photo. An old phone with no SIM works too, because everything runs over Wi-Fi.
Her side is one screen. A photo of your child, and a green button when it rings. Setting her up takes one invite from you, held up on a screen if you are together or sent to her if she is a country away, and a yes from you once she has opened it.
Reaching your child takes two things at once: an invite that came from a grown-up, and a yes from a grown-up you had already trusted with that account, given on their own phone. There is nothing to guess, nothing to search, and no list of children anywhere to leak. An invite forwarded to somebody else connects them to nobody. It can only put a name in front of you that you did not expect, and you decline it. Even somebody who stole everything we have could not create a single contact, because we hold nothing capable of granting one.
A closed circle keeps out strangers; it does nothing about a grown-up you already approved. That is what reporting is for, and it reaches a named person, not a shared inbox, within 24 hours. Read what happens when you report
They can start it, but nothing happens on their own. A child can scan a friend’s code, and it sits on their screen as a little hourglass until a grown-up on each side says yes. If nobody does, it quietly disappears, and a child is never shown that they were turned down.
Neither of you can be locked out. Any grown-up on the account can add another, and can step away themselves, but nobody can remove anybody else. That is deliberate. We are not going to build a button that lets one parent shut another out of their child’s account, and we are not going to referee a family disagreement.
That is what the two-grown-up design is for. Both parents hold the child’s account on their own phone, each approves contacts from their own phone, and neither can be locked out by the other. A child at one house can ring the parent at the other by tapping their photo, without asking anybody to hand over a phone or remember a number.
No. Rilo is voice only, on purpose. If that ever changes, this page will say so before any app store does.
No, and neither can we. You decide something bigger than that, which is who your child can talk to at all, and whether each contact is calls, messages, or both. At this age that is the part that actually protects them. The messages themselves are scrambled so only the two phones can open them, and that wall has no side door, not for us and not for a parent. If you want to read along, do it the old way and sit down together with the phone.
No. Messages live on the two phones and nowhere else. Nothing is copied to us, so there is nothing for us to hand back. A new phone starts empty.
There is very little to do anything with. Your child’s name, photo and age never reach us, and neither do their messages or any record of who they talk to. We do not sell anything, we do not run ads, and no analytics company is watching you read this page. See everything we store
If a second grown-up is on your child’s account, they can cut the lost phone off with one tap. For your child’s own phone you can print a recovery sheet when you set them up. Keep it with the passports. If you have neither, there is no way back in and you start over. We cannot let you back in, because we never had the key.
It lapses after 72 hours, and the tile quietly fades, exactly as it would have if you had declined. If you approve while the other phone is switched off, the decision waits up to 30 days for that phone to come back, then gives up. An approval never arrives as a button in a notification and cannot be swiped through. You open the app and read the screen.
Any responsible adult can cut any of the child’s contacts, including during a call in progress. It disappears from the child’s screen with no explanation, because explaining is a parent’s job and not a dialog box’s. Children can remove their own contacts too, but never their grown-ups.
Native apps for Android and iPhone. Phone and tablet. 14 languages from the first release. Available in the EU. Android 8.0 or newer; iPhone and iPad need iOS 17 or newer.
Now, on both. Rilo is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, and on Google Play for Android.