Actually useful
Every app has to solve a real problem without creating new ones.
We believe an app needs to earn its place in your life by solving a problem, and then letting you go and do more interesting things. We don't want you spending your day hooked to your phone, or to our apps. We want them to fill a gap, make life easier, or help you reach someone in a way that matters — without introducing new problems on the way, like taking too much of your time, or leaving you feeling you have to stare at a screen or you'll miss something important.
An app of ours succeeds when you spend less time in it, not more.
Low friction
Everything takes a few seconds, not a full session. Sensible defaults, plain visuals, lots of help when you want it.
We reduce all the friction, so you can get right to the thing you came to do. The core actions are one or two taps from opening the app. The defaults make sense before you even touch a setting. Our apps are offline first: no Internet connection, no problem, and if an app shares with others, your changes will sync later. The interface uses images and a strong visual language so you can see things at a glance. Accessibility and usability are first in line, not an afterthought. And help is available when you're ready to reach for it.
Low pressure
Nothing puts pressure on you. Not the app, not an algorithm, not your people.
Nothing in a Lowkey app puts pressure on you. There are no streaks to keep, no counters going up, no nagging notifications designed to pull you back in. In an app you share through, that covers the people you share with too: no read receipts, nothing that tells someone you saw it and have not answered. When an app does remind you, it is because you asked it to. Any app that wants something from you is an app that has stopped working for you. We won't do that.
Low noise
No feeds, no algorithms, no social comparison. Nothing arrives that you didn't ask for.
No feeds, no algorithmic ordering, no recommendations, and no way to measure yourself against anyone else. Nothing is placed in your day because it performed well for somebody else. In an app that shares data, the only things that reach you are what you asked for from a sharing circle you control.
High privacy
You decide who sees what, and you can change your mind. Privacy is where the design starts, not a setting added at the end.
An app should ask for as little as it can, and give you as much say as possible over whatever is left. In practice that means sharing is something you set up on purpose rather than something that happens by default, that you choose who sees what group by group, and that you can change it afterwards without starting over. It also means we would rather build so that most questions about your data have a boring answer than write a policy that explains an interesting one. Where the specifics matter, we write them down and put a date on them.
What Lowkey apps don't do
- Lowkey apps don't collect your data to sell to others. More than that, they're designed so there is as little of it as possible to sell: what you write lives on your device, and only what your chosen people need to see ever leaves it.
- Lowkey apps don't show you ads.
- Lowkey apps aren't designed for engagement.
- Lowkey apps don't include analytics SDKs or advertising identifiers, and crash reporting stays off unless you turn it on.
- Lowkey apps don't directly ask you for your email address. In apps that sign in with Google or Apple, the provider puts one in the sign-in record — we can see it there but we don't use it, we don't copy it to an application database, and deleting your account deletes it. See the FAQs on the application website for specific apps to see how this works for any particular app.
How the workshop works
Lowkey Workshop is very small — small enough that the person who answers your support email is probably the person who wrote the code. Apps get made slowly because they get made carefully: designed on paper first, built once the design holds up, and shipped when they're actually finished. There's no roadmap pressure here and no investor asking for growth, which is precisely why we can promise the things above and mean them.
See our apps