How can we help?

Not to sign up — but you do need one to be connected to anybody, and that’s rather the point. There’s no search, no directory and no “people you may know”, so an account on its own is an empty app until someone invites you. Your invitation arrives by email with a short code in it. Sign up with the address it was sent to and you land straight in; use a different address and you can enter the code afterwards from Settings → Enter an invite code.

No. You can sign in with Apple, Google, or a one-tap magic link sent to your email — there’s no password to create, forget or leak. Nothing in Badger should ever ask you for one.

Badger is a full app on iPhone and Android. In a browser, and soon on Mac and Windows, it runs as a companion: it reads and writes your conversations, but it pairs with your phone rather than standing alone, shows a read-only map, and doesn’t get push notifications. Set your phone up first.

Open Badger in a browser and sign in with the same account — it shows you a short code. On your phone, go to Settings → Devices → Link a Companion App and type that code in. That handshake is how your encryption keys reach the browser, and it’s the reason nobody, us included, can read your messages without one of your own devices agreeing to it. Give it a few seconds and your conversations appear.

It’s your own short personal code, found in Settings. Give it to someone and they can start a chat with you by entering it — no phone number or email address to swap. You can also enter someone else’s from the + menu.

Sign up with whichever address you prefer, then open Settings → Enter an invite code and put in the code from your invitation email. If you sign up with the exact address you were invited on, it’s matched automatically and there’s nothing to do.

Tap + and take your pick. New chat opens your phone’s own contacts list, so you’re picking from people you already know. New group lets you name a group and invite people to it. Or use Enter a BadgerCode if a friend has given you theirs. Anyone who isn’t on Badger yet gets an email invitation with a code; anyone who is gets a request in their inbox. Nothing is shared until they accept.

Open Settings and update your display name or photo. Changes show up for your friends automatically. Your name and avatar are the only things other people ever see about you.

No. Your chats and groups are end-to-end encrypted — encrypted on your device and only decrypted on your friends’ devices. That covers your text, photos, videos, voice notes and files. We can’t read them, and neither can anyone in between.

Six things, each with its own switch: your location, your mood, your status, your status emoji, your read receipts, and whether people can save the media you send. Set them globally in Settings → Privacy, or per conversation under that conversation’s Privacy options — so you can share your mood with your family and not with the five-a-side crew. Where a higher layer has already switched something off, the lower switch is greyed out and tells you why.

Yes — sharing is mutual, and that’s a security property rather than a nicety. You’ll see other people on a map only while you’re sharing your own location, and you’ll see someone’s mood, emoji or status only if you’re sharing yours. Read receipts work the same way: if you don’t send them, you don’t see them. There’s no way to be a one-way mirror, by design.

Only the people you choose, and only while you’re choosing to share. There are three layers, and each can share less than the one above it but never more. Settings → Privacy is the master switch: turn location off there and it’s off everywhere, full stop. A group’s admins decide whether that group has a map at all. And in each conversation you choose whether you’re on its map. In a one-to-one chat the map only appears if both of you have turned it on. If you share nothing, you appear to no one.

It hides you on every map at once — every chat, every group — without you having to unpick a single per-conversation setting. Your device stops publishing a location, and the coordinates already stored for you are overwritten, so the place you were standing when you switched it on isn’t left sitting on a server for anyone (us included) to look at. Your friends simply see that you’re in Ghost Mode. Turn it on from the 👻 in any map or conversation header, and off again the same way.

Two different answers, and we’d rather give you both plainly. Your messages and media are fully end-to-end encrypted today — we cannot read them. Your mood, status and status emoji are on their way into that same encryption: the scrambling is built and running, and the last piece is switching our own apps over to read it, so for now they are stored on our servers, protected by access rules and encrypted in transit and at rest, and shared only with the people you’ve chosen. Your location is different by design. It stays on our servers in a form we could technically read, because the parts of Badger that fetch your position in the background — including when your phone is asleep — cannot hold your keys. So for location we rely on collecting as little as possible instead: only while somebody you’ve allowed is looking at the map, only where you are now rather than a trail, never for advertising. And in Ghost Mode, nobody — not even us — can know where you are: your phone stops sending, and stops asking. Ghost Mode and every privacy switch work exactly as described.

Only if you let them. Media saving is one of the six privacy switches, so you can allow it generally and switch it off for a particular conversation, or the other way round. With it off, your pictures stay viewable inside Badger but can’t be saved to anyone’s camera roll. Your own media is always yours to save.

No. Other people only ever see your display name and avatar. Your email is how you sign in — it’s never shown to the friends or groups you talk to.

On purpose. Because messages are end-to-end encrypted, the contents are never sent to a notification — you’ll see who messaged you and what kind of thing they sent (“a photo”, “a voice message”), then open Badger to read it securely.

Because the moment something leaves Badger, it leaves the protection Badger was built to give it. Everything you post is end-to-end encrypted and only ever readable by the people in that conversation — nobody in between, not even us. A “share to another app” button would quietly break that promise: it would decrypt your post, hand the plain content to a program with its own rules, and drop it somewhere you no longer control — screenshotted, re-shared, backed up to someone else’s cloud, or scanned for advertising. Worse, it isn’t only your privacy on the line: a post can carry other people’s words, faces and whereabouts, and they trusted a closed group, not the open internet. So Badger deliberately keeps posts inside the encrypted circle you shared them with. Bringing something into a conversation from another app is fine — use the system Share sheet to send a link, photo or file into Badger, where it’s encrypted on the way in.

No. There is no search, no directory, no suggestions and no friends-of-friends. People reach you because you invited them, gave them your BadgerCode, or accepted their request from your inbox — and nothing about you is shared until you do.

Only the number of people. A chat is a conversation with one other person; a group is a named conversation with several. Both are the same private, end-to-end encrypted feed, with the same posts, media and privacy controls. A group additionally has admins, who can invite people, set a retention window and decide whether the group has a map.

Yes — each conversation has a posting style. Pick the post button in the corner (tap to write, like Bluesky or X) or the expanding composer that grows as you type and can go full-screen, like WhatsApp. You can also flip the feed to scroll the other way, so the newest post sits at the bottom.

Swipe the post right, or tap the ❝ icon in its action row, and it drops into your composer as a quote. Write your reply underneath and send — everyone sees the original boxed beneath your words, even when it was a photo or a video.

Type @ and pick them from the list that appears. Their name becomes a tappable chip and they get a “mentioned you” nudge — which they can turn on or off separately from ordinary messages in Settings → Notifications.

Group admins can pin one post to the top of the feed, so the plan or the house rules stay put for everyone. Unpin it the same way.

Every post has an action row: like, quote and, on your own posts, delete. You can also press and hold your own message. A deleted message reads “This message was deleted” for everyone, with any photo or video gone too, and it can’t be undone. You can only delete your own.

Tap the like count. On your own posts, the ⓘ icon opens a fuller picture: who has read it, everyone who liked it, and everyone who replied.

Swipe a conversation left and tap Archive to move it onto an Archived shelf; a new message brings it back automatically unless you’ve turned on Keep archived. For something more private, swipe left → More → Hide: it goes into a hidden vault that new messages never pull back out. Open the vault by pressing and holding the Badger logo at the top of your list, behind Face ID or your passcode. Both are private to you — and by default nothing on your hub reveals the vault exists at all.

That’s up to you and your group’s admins. A group admin can set a retention window, after which messages tidy themselves away for everyone. Separately, Settings → Default auto-delete sets a timer that’s applied to every new conversation you start.

Yes. Your sent invitations sit in their own panel in your inbox, so you can see what’s still pending and rescind anything that hasn’t been accepted.

Keep typing. Badger shows an Offline banner, queues whatever you send, and delivers it the moment you’re back — nothing is lost in a tunnel or on a plane.

Yes — you’ll see their avatar with a little animated pill while they’re writing. In a busy group, several avatars stack up together.

A group can follow public accounts on Bluesky or Reddit, or any RSS feed, and their latest posts appear in the group feed alongside everyone’s own — up to twenty sources, curated by the group’s admins in group settings → Feeds. Every member gets a checklist and can mute any feed for themselves alone. These are public web posts, kept neatly separate from your encrypted messages.

Tap + for photos and albums, video, voice notes, files, GIFs and stickers — all encrypted on your device before they go anywhere. Attach something and keep typing: your words and your photo send as one post, not two.

Both. + → Voice records with a live waveform, and the person at the other end gets a player they can scrub through. For video, record on the spot or pick one from your gallery. On the free plan videos run to 30 seconds and voice notes to a minute; if a video is longer, Badger offers to trim it rather than simply refusing. Badger+ lifts both limits.

Add a Poll from the + menu with a question and a few options; everyone taps to vote, and anyone can tap View votes to see who chose what. Polls are part of Badger+.

On iPhone and Android, use the system Share sheet and pick Badger — then choose the conversation. On a Mac or PC, drag the file straight onto the Badger window. It’s encrypted on the way in.

Use the header at the top of any conversation — it’s there whether or not the conversation has a map. Pick a primary and secondary mood, add a status emoji, and write a short status in your own words. Swipe the header down for the full bar, or up to collapse it. Everything updates for your people live, and on your home-screen widget.

Conversations that have a map get two tabs: Chat for the feed and Map for just the people in that conversation. It’s the same circle seen two ways. If nobody in the conversation shares location — or the admins have switched the group’s map off — there’s no Map tab at all, and the conversation works exactly as before.

When people are close together their markers fan out into a tidy “spider” so nobody’s hidden underneath. A bigger crowd collapses into a single count bubble — tap it to zoom in and break it apart.

A marker carries that person’s avatar, a coloured mood aura, their status emoji, and — if they’ve turned it on — a small activity icon. Tap a marker to open their status and start a chat.

That’s activity detection: walking, running, cycling or driving, worked out on that person’s own phone. Out in the world, with a location being shared, Badger can get more specific — telling a hike from a stroll, skiing from sledging, a train from a car, and spotting swimming, sailing or a round of golf, by comparing where someone is against what’s there. It waits for a run of consistent readings first, so a road beside a railway doesn’t turn a drive into a train journey.

Only if you turn on Settings → Activity — it’s off until you ask for it, and that screen is the only place Badger requests the permission. It reads the same motion coprocessor your phone already uses to count steps, entirely on your device; no raw sensor data ever leaves it. The real prize is battery: knowing you haven’t moved lets Badger skip a GPS fix altogether rather than waking the radio to discover you’re still on the sofa.

Not in the slightest. Plenty of people use Badger purely for the conversations and never switch a map on. Leave location off in Settings → Privacy and every conversation simply works as a private feed.

Yes. Unlimited chats and groups, every privacy control and exactly the same encryption, free forever. The free plan carries a few unobtrusive ads and has limits on the big stuff: videos up to 30 seconds, voice notes up to a minute, and files up to 1 MB.

No ads at all, polls, videos up to 5 minutes, voice notes up to 10 minutes and files up to 10 MB. It’s sold monthly or annually — the annual plan works out around 39% cheaper — and your app store always shows the exact price in your own currency before you agree to anything. It isn’t on sale during the alpha, so choose Try before you buy at sign-up.

They’re keyed only to the interest categories you pick in Settings → Interests — never your identity, your messages, your friends or where you are. Ads are requested as non-personalised, so no advertising profile is built about you, and we don’t sell your personal data to anyone. Badger+ removes them entirely.

Work down the layers. Is location on in Settings → Privacy? Is it on for this conversation — does the map header show 📍 rather than 🔒? In a group, have the admins left the group map switched on? In a one-to-one chat, have you both opted in? Is Ghost Mode off? And has your phone granted Badger location permission? One more thing that looks like a fault but isn’t: location legitimately sleeps when nobody is looking at a map you’re on, and wakes up when someone does — so a position that hasn’t moved for a while, with nobody watching, is working as intended.

Check that Badger is allowed to notify you in your phone’s own settings, then check Settings → Notifications in Badger — each kind (messages, mentions, replies, reactions, polls, invitations) has its own switch. A single conversation can also override your account-wide choice from its own settings, so check there too. Note that companions — the web, Mac and Windows apps — don’t receive push notifications at all; that’s expected.

Sharing is mutual, so start there: are you both sharing location in that conversation? In a one-to-one chat the map only exists once both of you have opted in. In a group, the admins must have the group’s map switched on, and each of you chooses individually whether to appear on it. And your account-wide switch in Settings → Privacy overrides everything below it.

Exactly one — your phone. Open Settings → Devices to see everywhere you’re signed in and choose which device publishes your location. Companions in a browser, on a Mac or on a PC never publish at all; their map is read-only.

That’s a newly linked device catching up. Linking hands over the keys for your conversations as they stand now; the keys for older messages have to be fetched from a device that already holds them. It usually sorts itself out within moments of your phone being awake and online. If a message is still waiting long after that, open Badger on your phone for a moment — and if it still won’t budge, tell us, because that one’s a bug.

Free limits on video length, voice-note length, file size and polls arrived with Badger+. Where there’s a sensible free path, Badger offers it rather than blocking you — a long video is offered a trim, for instance. If a gate ever leaves you with no way forward at all, that’s worth telling us about.

Try closing and reopening Badger, or refreshing the web app. If it persists, let us know below — a quick description of what you were doing helps a lot. If you’re an alpha tester, the Report a bug button at the top of your conversations list is the quickest route, since it already knows your build.