Rilo turns an old phone or tablet into a first phone for a child who is too young for one of their own. They can call and message the people their parents have approved: you, their grandparents, a best friend. Nobody else can reach them, because there is nothing in the app to find them by.
Who it’s for
Children of roughly 4 to 10, and the grown-ups who decide who they may talk to. The child’s side is a grid of faces: hold one to call. It works for a child who can’t read yet. The grown-up’s side is an ordinary app behind a lock only they can open.
Features
- End-to-end encrypted voice calls, straight from phone to phone whenever the network allows.
- Typed messages and fox stickers. No photos, no video, no links.
- Only approved contacts. A new contact starts with an invite from a grown-up, by holding two phones together or sending it to someone far away, and only becomes real once a grown-up on each side has approved it. No search, no usernames, no friend suggestions.
- Grown-ups stay in charge. Turn calling or messaging off for any person at any time, or remove them. Every change asks for your face or passcode first.
- No SIM needed. An old phone on Wi-Fi is enough.
- Fifteen languages, from Dutch and English to Ukrainian and Arabic.
Rilo is free to install, and free for everyone a child calls: grandparents never pay to be called. Setting up a child starts with a free period, after which a grown-up buys a subscription in the app through the App Store or Google Play, from €1 a month. Rilo is available in the European Union.
Privacy
Calls and messages are end-to-end encrypted, and the keys never leave the phones, so we can’t read, hear or see any of it. The server is a matchmaker, not a middleman: it knows a random account id, a public key and the address Apple or Google uses to wake the phone for a call. There is no name column anywhere, no contact list, no history of who called whom and no location. There are no ads, no analytics and no third-party tracking code; crash reports carry no account or name and are deleted after 30 days. The full list, table by table, is on rilotalk.com, next to the privacy policy, child safety and deleting an account.
Made by
Made in Belgium by Marijn Vandevoorde, as Small Victories BV. More on rilotalk.com.