Give and get kindness
on-the-go

1. It's a mobile app.
2. You anonymously write requests about things you're worried about.
3. Other people can reply to your requests with kindness and compassion.
4. You can reply to others' requests too.
5. The app has spam and bad word filters, and reports are taken seriously.

It’s tempting to think Gentle is about solving your deepest problems, but that’s not the goal. One of the expectations you agree to when you start is “I recognize I can’t fix others’ problems, but I can share kindness.”

If there is a “goal” in this app, it's to take the reflection and empathy it encourages into other parts of your life.

It's important to note that Gentle is not a replacement for counseling. If anything, I hope it will encourage people to seek out professional support when it's helpful.

Absolutely, yes! Kind Words, Animal Crossing, A Short Hike, Slowly, lo-fi hip hop radio, and many more. There's been a growing appetite for experiences that inject kind feels into your life. I'd argue there's nothing novel here beyond my own take on the genre. The closest thing I've worked on is a conversation tool called Supportive.

Gentle was designed to be a cute and delightful experience. I hope you find something wonderful on it!

• At official launch, Gentle will be a paid app.
• We moderate the content and provide easy-to-use reporting tools.
• We use spam and bad word filters.
• We timeout or ban users who repeatedly or flagrantly break our rules.
• Personally identifying information is banned from any messages.
• All new users agree to community expectations.
• (Soon) We'll offer guides and tips for writing excellent messages.
• (Soon) If the app notices that somebody is writing about concerning topics like self-harm, it will privately and proactively offer resources from professionals.

There's lots of ideas brewing. If you have any ideas, reach out and share it!

• Stickers, letter styles, new envelopes, and more
• Formal community and moderation guidelines
• Replying more than once to someone (could be chatting, 1-time replies, etc.)
• Dark mode and accessibility fixes
• Non-addictive push notifications
• Ability to login to sync data across devices
• Collectables and a place to keep them
• Messages in a bottle?
• And many more...!

You can follow a more specific roadmap on this this Trello board.

Gentle will be a paid app. There are no ads.

A positive byproduct of being a paid app is ensuring that Gentle is moderated well.

There may be future in-app purchases for cosmetics (such as envelope types, stickers, and more). However, the plan is to provide a hefty amount of cosmetics by default.

• If you trust me, the creator and moderator of Gentle. Previously, I worked in the Privacy org at Facebook, which I’m sure will spook some people. Today, I work at Khan Academy as a designer.
• If you are comfortable with the design choices in this app. The anonymous nature of the app lends it to be more difficult to connect things to who you are. You are also able to push the “eject” button at anytime and delete your stuff.
• If you are comfortable with your device communicating with Google's Firebase, which is used as the server, and Sentry.io, which is used as a crash log.

I will only read something you wrote if it is reported by someone.

This is a flimsy guarantee based on trust. If I become corrupt, I hope you hold me accountable by complaining loudly and deleting the app.

Because Gentle is not encrypted, I do have the ability to read the messages you send. However, because this app is anonymous and it doesn't collect personal data, it's likely impossible to identify who you are.

In the future, I’m interested in encrypting replies so that it becomes infeasible to read messages. However, this will depend on whether it’s seen as a valuable investment by the community.

No! I have no interest in collecting the details of your life or sharing it with anyone. See Gentle's Privacy Policy to learn about the minimal data we store.

Please don't send identifying information in this app. This includes names, pseudonyms, addresses, emails, telephone numbers, locations, and more.

Gentle is no longer live, but an Android version was planned. The app was built with a cross-platform framework called Flutter, so it would be quite easy to get an Android version ready.