Using Badger

Getting started

Anyone can create an account — but Badger is only worth anything once you're connected to somebody, so the usual first step is a friend sending you an invitation. Either way, there are no passwords to remember.

Sign in

Tap Continue with Apple or Continue with Google, or pop in your email and we’ll send you a magic link — tap it and you’re in. Brand new? That same tap creates your account.

Pick a display name

This is how friends recognise you in your conversations. It — and your avatar — are the only things other people ever see about you; your email address is never shown to anyone. Change either any time in Settings.

Your first conversation

Tap + and take your pick: a new chat with someone from your contacts, a new group you name and invite people to, or enter a BadgerCode if a friend has given you theirs. There’s a search box and your recently-active people right there too.

✉️

Invited by a friend? Sign up with the email address they invited, and you’ll land in their group automatically. If you’d rather use a different address, sign up with that one and then go to Settings → Enter an invite code with the code from your invitation email.

💳

Free to use. When you sign up you’ll pick a plan. Badger is free, supported by a few unobtrusive ads keyed only to the interests you choose — never your identity, location or messages. Badger+ removes them and lifts a few limits; it isn’t on sale yet, so for now choose Try before you buy and you’re straight in. See Free & Badger+.

📱

Your phone is the full app. Badger on iPhone and Android does everything. On a browser, Mac or Windows PC it runs as a companion that pairs with your phone — see Your devices & companions.

Conversations: chats & groups

This is where you’ll spend your time. In Badger, every conversation is a feed — a calm, scrolling list of posts, like the big social apps, except everyone in it is someone you actually know. No strangers, no algorithm deciding what you see, no discover tab. Just your circle. A conversation with one friend works exactly like one with a whole crew; both are end-to-end encrypted.

Chats

Start a new conversation to open a private 1:1 chat, a feed just for the two of you. Text, photos, videos, voice notes, files and GIFs, all encrypted. The little ticks by the time tell you when a message is sending, sent and read — read receipts are optional and mutual, so if you switch them off you stop seeing other people’s too — and each post has a quick action row to like, quote or delete it, or swipe a post right to quote it straight into your composer.

Groups

Create a named group for your housemates, a trip, or a regular crew — the same feed, more people. Invite people by name, promote co-admins, and set how long messages are kept before they auto-expire. Open the members list any time to see who’s in. Admins also decide whether the group has a map at all — see Privacy: what you share.

Two ways to post

Every conversation lets you pick a posting style: a post button in the corner — tap to write, like Bluesky or X — or a familiar expanding composer that grows as you type and can pop out full-screen, like WhatsApp. Prefer newest at the bottom? Flip the feed to scroll the other way.

Deleting a message

Changed your mind? Press and hold your own message and confirm — it’s replaced with “This message was deleted” for everyone in the conversation. You can only delete your own messages, and it can’t be undone.

Tidy your hub: archive & hide

Your conversation list is yours to keep tidy. Swipe a conversation left and tap Archive to tuck it onto an Archived shelf at the top of your list — a new message quietly brings it back, unless you’ve turned on Keep archived to make it stay put. For something more private, swipe left → More → Hide: the conversation drops into a hidden vault that new messages never pull back out. Reveal the vault by pressing and holding the Badger logo at the top of your list — behind Face ID or your passcode, if your phone has them set. Both are private to you: nobody else can tell you’ve archived or hidden anything.

🕵️

By default there’s nothing on your hub that reveals a hidden vault even exists — that’s rather the point. If you’d rather have a visible row for it, turn on Show Hidden on the hub in Settings; the long-press works either way.

✍️

When someone’s writing back, you’ll see a little typing indicator — their avatar with a playful animated pill. If a few people are typing at once in a group, their avatars stack up together, so you know an answer’s on the way.

📡

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

✉️

Incoming chat requests and group invitations land in your inbox. Accept to start sharing, or decline — nothing is shared until you say yes. The invitations you’ve sent sit in their own panel, so you can see what’s still pending and rescind any that haven’t been accepted yet.

Moods & status

At the top of every conversation there’s a header that’s all about you: a primary and a secondary mood, a status emoji for what you’re up to, and a short line of status in your own words. It’s the gentle heartbeat of Badger — a way to say how you’re doing without having to actually message anyone.

Tap a mood to open the picker and choose from a rich palette; your choice tints how you appear to your people.
Swipe the header down for the full bar with your status line, or swipe it up to collapse it to a single tidy row.
Your mood, emoji and status update everywhere at once — including your home-screen widget.

🤝

Each of these is one of your privacy switches, and each is reciprocal — you see someone’s mood only if you’re sharing yours. Share nothing and the header simply becomes your own private note to self.

Posts

Posts are a calmer way to share with a whole group — like a campfire rather than a megaphone.

Write a post to a group and everyone in it can see it.
Reply by quoting. Swipe a post right and it drops straight into your composer — the quickest way to answer one particular post rather than the room.
Like a post, and tap the like count to see exactly who reacted.
Quote a post — swipe it right, or tap the ❝ icon, to re-post it with your own comment. The original shows boxed beneath what you wrote, even when it was a photo or a video, so everyone can see what you’re answering.
@mention someone: type @ and pick them from the list. Their name becomes a tappable chip, and they get a gentle “mentioned you” nudge.
Post info: tap the ⓘ icon in a post’s corner to see who has read it (your own posts), everyone who liked it, and everyone who replied.
Delete your own post — press and hold it, or tap the 🗑 bin in its action row, then confirm. It becomes “Post deleted” for everyone — text, photos and all. It can’t be undone.

📌

Group admins can pin one post to the top of the feed so it stays put for everyone — handy for the plan, the house rules, or the thing nobody should miss. Unpin it just as easily.

🚫

There’s no “share to another app”. The moment a post leaves Badger it leaves the encryption that protects it — and it isn’t only your privacy on the line, since a post can carry other people’s words and faces. Sharing into Badger from elsewhere is fine; see Media & sharing.

Formatting your messages

Messages and posts are more than plain text. Wrap a couple of characters around your words — much like WhatsApp — and Badger turns them into structured posts. You type a shortcut and it just formats; there’s nothing to learn and no menus to hunt through.

In the post composer you see the finished look as you type — headings grow, bullets and quote bars take shape, links tidy themselves up, and @mentions and #hashtags light up. Start a list or a quote and press Return and the next line carries on for you; an empty line ends it. What you’re writing already looks like what you’ll post.

Emphasis

*your words* → bold
_your words_ → italic
~your words~ → ~~strikethrough~~
==your words== → a highlight
`your words` → monospace code — an old-school bright-green-on-black terminal look

⌨️

The backtick ` is a little hidden on the iPhone keyboard: tap 123, then press and hold the apostrophe ' key and choose ` from the pop-up.

Structure

# A title → a bold, larger heading line
- an item → a bulleted list (one - at the start of each line)
1. an item → a numbered list (Badger keeps the numbers in order for you)
> a quote → an indented block quote with a single side bar down the whole thing
#hashtag → a coloured tag (a # followed by a space is a heading; with no space it’s a tag)

Links

Paste any web address and Badger makes it tappable, shown tidily as its site name. Want a friendly label instead? Write [our plan](https://…) and it shows as “our plan”.

✨

Formatting is applied only when a message is shown — your encrypted text is never changed, so a friend on an older version simply sees the plain characters. Nothing breaks.

Media & sharing

Tap the + in any conversation to send more than words. Everything is encrypted on your device first, so only the people in the conversation can open it. Attach something and keep typing — your words and your photo go as one post, not two.

Photos & video

Send a single photo or a whole album, or a video — record a clip on the spot or pick one from your gallery. Photos open in a clean full-screen viewer; videos play with a tap. Free videos go up to 30 seconds; if yours is longer, Badger offers to trim it there and then, or to lift the limit with Badger+.

Voice notes

Tap + → Voice and just talk — you’ll see a live waveform as you record. Send it and your friends get a player they can scrub through, waveform and all. Up to a minute on the free plan.

Files, GIFs & stickers

Attach a document or any file straight from your device — up to 1 MB free — or drop in a GIF or sticker to say it with a little more personality.

Polls

Can’t agree on a plan? Add a Poll with a question and a few options. Everyone taps to vote, and anyone can tap View votes to see who picked what. Polls are part of Badger+.

Sharing from other apps

On iPhone & Android: use the system Share sheet and pick Badger to send a link, photo, video or file straight into a conversation.
On a Mac or PC: drag an image, link or file onto the Badger window and choose who to send it to.

🔒

Heavier media — video, voice notes and files — is encrypted and stored as opaque blobs, with the key kept only on your devices. Nobody in between can open them.

💾

Your photos, your rules. You choose whether people can save the media you send — globally in Settings → Privacy, or per conversation. Turn it off and your pictures stay inside Badger, viewable but not saveable to anyone’s camera roll.

Feeds from the web

A group can follow the outside world. In a group’s settings → Feeds, an admin can subscribe it to public accounts on Bluesky or Reddit, or any RSS feed, and their latest posts drop into the group feed alongside everyone’s own — a shared reading room for the five-a-side club, the band you all follow, or the local news.

Admins curate. Add or remove accounts, grouped by where they come from. A group can follow up to twenty.
You choose what you see. Every member gets a checklist of the group’s feeds — tick the ones you want and untick any you’d rather skip. Muting a feed hides it for you alone, never for the rest of the group.

🔒

These are public web posts, kept neatly separate from your end-to-end-encrypted conversation — they’re there to read, and they never mix into your private messages.

Privacy: what you share

Badger gives you three layers of control, and they only ever stack one way: each layer can share less than the one above it, never more.

Your account settings — the master switch

Settings → Privacy is the top layer, and it wins everywhere. Six switches: your location, mood, status, status emoji, read receipts, and whether people may save media you send. Turn one off here and nothing below can turn it back on — not a conversation, not a group admin.

Group admins — whether the group has a map

A group’s admins decide whether that group has a map at all. Switch it off and nobody shares location there. That is the only thing admins control — your mood, status, emoji and receipts stay yours alone, in every group.

Each conversation — the fine grain

Open any chat or group and choose Privacy options to set those same things just for that conversation. Share your mood with the family and not the five-a-side crew; keep read receipts on where you like them and off where you don’t. Where a higher layer has already decided, the switch is greyed out and tells you why.

🤝

Sharing is mutual — and that’s a security feature, not 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. It works the same way for read receipts — if you don’t send them, you don’t see them. Nobody gets a one-way mirror, and that includes you.

Ghost Mode

Ghost Mode is the panic button: switch it on and you vanish from every map at once, in every chat and group, without unpicking a single per-conversation setting. Your device stops publishing a position, and the coordinates already stored for you are overwritten — so where you were standing when you flipped it isn’t left sitting on a server.

It lives behind the same glyph at the top of any conversation — 📍 when you’re sharing there, 🔒 when you’re not, 👻 when you’re hidden everywhere. Tap it and you’re offered both choices: just this conversation, or every map at once. Tap again to come back.

Who sees what, in one line

Nobody but the people in a conversation can read its messages or open its media — not us, not anyone in between.
Your email address is never shown to anyone. Other people see your display name and avatar, and nothing else.
Ads see only the interest categories you pick in Settings — never your identity, your messages or where you are.
Nobody can find you. There’s no search, no directory and no suggestions: people reach you because you invited them or accepted them.

The map, if you want it

The map is an option, not the point — plenty of people use Badger purely for the conversations. When you do want it, it’s the other way into the same people: rather than a list of names, you get a picture of your circle right now, showing everyone who’s sharing with you in that conversation.

Every conversation that has a map gets two tabs: Chat for the feed, and Map for just the people in it. Swap between them with a tap, so “where is everyone?” is one tap from “are we still on?”.

Reading the map

A coloured aura around a marker shows that person’s mood at a glance, with their status emoji beside it.
The map frames itself to fit everyone who’s sharing with you, so you land on the people who matter rather than an empty ocean.
A small activity icon can show what someone’s up to, if they’ve turned that on.
Friends standing close together fan out into a tidy “spider” so nobody’s hidden underneath.
A crowd collapses into a single count bubble — tap it to zoom in and break it apart.
Tap any marker to open that person’s status and jump straight into a chat.

Turning it on — and off

Every map header carries a 📍 pin when you’re sharing there, and a 🔒 padlock when you’re not. Tap it to change your mind on the spot. If the padlock isn’t yours to unlock — because your account settings have location off, or the admins have turned this group’s map off — tapping it tells you exactly which one, and where to change it.

A 1:1 chat only gets a map when both of you have turned it on: it’s an invitation, not something either of you can switch on for the other. In a group it’s simply your own choice whether you’re on that group’s map. And you see other people only while you’re sharing yourself.

🔋

Location sleeps when nobody’s looking. Badger doesn’t stream your position all day: it publishes only while someone you’ve allowed is actually looking at a map you’re on, and switches the radio off entirely the rest of the time. Turning on Activity saves more still, because Badger can tell you haven’t moved without taking a fix at all.

📲

Only one of your devices publishes your location — your phone. Pick which one in Settings → Devices; companions on the web, a Mac or a PC never publish at all.

Activity: what you’re up to

Badger can work out whether you’re walking, running, cycling or driving, and show it as a little icon on your marker and your home-screen widget. It’s off until you turn it on in Settings → Activity, because it needs your phone’s Motion & Fitness permission and we’d rather you knew what you were saying yes to.

It saves battery. Knowing you haven’t moved lets Badger skip a GPS fix entirely, rather than waking the radio to discover you’re still on the sofa. That’s the honest headline reason to turn it on.
It’s worked out on your own device, by the motion coprocessor your phone already uses for step counting. No raw sensor data ever leaves your phone — only the answer, and only to people you already share with.
Out in the world it gets more specific. While you’re sharing a location, Badger can tell a hike from a stroll, skiing from sledging, a train from a car, and spot swimming, sailing or a round of golf — by comparing where you are with what’s there. It waits for a run of consistent readings before it says so, so a road beside a railway doesn’t turn your drive into a train journey.
With it off, Badger falls back to guessing from your GPS speed — less accurate, and heavier on battery.

🚶

Your activity follows the same rules as everything else: it rides along with your location, so if you’re not sharing where you are with someone, they don’t see what you’re doing either.

Notifications

Badger tells you when something needs you — and lets you decide exactly what counts. In Settings → Notifications you can turn each kind on or off on its own: messages, @mentions, replies, reactions, poll votes and invitations. Want the whole picture but only a buzz when someone actually mentions you? That’s a couple of taps.

Any single conversation can overrule the lot. Open a chat or group’s settings → Notifications to make one busy group quieter than the rest, or a favourite one louder — or leave it on Use my app setting and it just follows your account-wide choice. Either way the app-icon badge stays honest, so the number always matches what’s waiting.

🔒

For your privacy, a notification tells you who it’s from and the kind of thing they sent — “a photo”, “a voice message”, “a poll” — but never the actual contents. Open the app to read the encrypted message.

💻

Push notifications arrive on your phone. Companions — the web, Mac and Windows apps — don’t buzz; they show what’s new when they’re open.

Your devices & companions

Badger on iPhone and Android is the full app. In a browser, on a Mac or on Windows it runs as a companion: it reads and writes your conversations, but it pairs with your phone rather than standing alone.

That’s the encryption doing its job rather than a limitation we chose. The keys to your conversations live on your devices and never on our servers, so a new device starts out holding none of them and has to be let in by one that already has them.

Open Badger on the other device

Type that code into your phone

Settings → Devices → Link a Companion App, and enter the code. That handshake hands your keys over — which is exactly why nobody, us included, can read your messages without one of your own devices agreeing to it.

Give it a moment

Your conversations appear. A freshly-paired companion picks up from now onward — older messages catch up once your phone is awake and online.

In Settings → Devices you can see everywhere you’re signed in, rename a device, sign one out remotely, and choose which of them publishes your location.

🧭

What a companion doesn’t do: publish your location (your phone owns that, and a companion’s map is read-only), or receive push notifications. Everything else — reading, writing, media, privacy controls — works as usual.

Add the Badger widget to your iPhone or Android home screen for an at-a-glance view of your own status — your mood, status emoji and what you’re up to, plus a count of unread messages and pending invitations. Tap it to jump straight back into the app.

🏠

The widget only ever shows your own status and counts — never your friends’ — and it refreshes as your mood and messages change.

Free & Badger+

The social part of Badger is free forever: unlimited chats and groups, every privacy control, and exactly the same encryption. The free plan carries a few unobtrusive ads, keyed only to the interest categories you choose in Settings — never your identity, your messages or where you are.

Badger+ takes the ads away and lifts the limits on the big stuff:

Videos — 30 seconds free, up to 5 minutes on Plus. Over the limit, Badger always offers to trim rather than simply refusing.
Voice notes — a minute free, up to 10 minutes on Plus.
Files — 1 MB free, up to 10 MB on Plus.
Polls — part of Badger+.
No ads at all.

💳

Badger+ is 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 yet: during the alpha, choose Try before you buy at sign-up.

Settings & your account

Everything lives in one list, roughly grouped as: who you are, what you share, how Badger looks, how it behaves, and your account.

You

Display name & avatar — how friends see you.
Your BadgerCode — your personal code. Give it to someone and they can start a chat with you without swapping phone numbers or email addresses.
Interests — the interest categories used to keep ads relevant, and the only thing ever shared with an advertiser.

Privacy

Privacy — the master switches for your location, mood, status, status emoji, read receipts and media saving. See Privacy: what you share.

How it looks

Theme — light, dark, or match your system; your choice follows you across your devices.
Map style and marker style — pick the map you like looking at, and how friends’ markers are drawn on it.
Compose style — how the message box behaves when you write.
Feed order — newest posts at the top or at the bottom, whichever way your brain works.
Show Hidden on the hub — off by default, so nothing gives the vault away.

How it behaves

Notifications — choose which kinds notify you — messages, mentions, replies, reactions, polls, invitations — for your whole account, then fine-tune any single conversation. See Notifications.
Activity — turn activity detection on or off, and read what it’s for. See Activity.
Enter key — whether Enter sends the message or starts a new line.
Default auto-delete — set a timer so your posts tidy themselves away after a while, in every new conversation you start.
Location updates — how often your position refreshes while someone’s watching, and how far you move before it does.

Your account

Sign-in methods — the ways you can get back in: your email link, Apple, Google.
Devices — everywhere you’re signed in. Rename one, sign one out remotely, choose which device publishes your location, or link a new companion.
Enter an invite code — if someone invited you on a different email address to the one you signed up with, this is where you put things right.
Badger+ — your plan, and where you’d subscribe when it goes on sale.
Help & FAQ — the same answers as this website, inside the app.
Sign out clears this device and stops notifications to it. Delete account erases everything when you want a clean break.

🙋

Stuck on something? The Help page covers the most common questions, and the FAQ explains how Badger thinks — or reach us from either.