Starling

Starling is private location sharing for your circle: family, a partner, a small group of friends. There is no account to make and no company sitting in the middle reading your position.

End to end encrypted

Your location is encrypted on your device with AES-256-GCM under a key only your circle's phones hold. That key never travels in an invite link: an invite carries a one-time code, and a new member gets the circle's keys only after you compare a safety number with them and accept. The relay stores ciphertext it cannot read. Names, avatars, and statuses ride inside that same ciphertext.

Nothing to sign up for

No phone number. No email. No push tokens. Starling runs no analytics, no crash reporting, and makes no third party requests. The only thing it fetches from outside its own server is OpenStreetMap map tiles, and only if you leave the street basemap on. Switch to the Off-grid basemap and the app draws the map locally, with zero network requests.

A zero-knowledge relay

The relay is a small server that moves ciphertext between your circle's devices. It sees channel ids, message sizes (padded to a fixed length so they carry no information), timing, and IP addresses, but never a position, a name, or who is in your circle. Every row expires after 24 hours and there are no backups by design. The default relay runs on Cloudflare Workers, so Cloudflare sees the same IP addresses and timing. Tor mode hides your IP from both.

Panic wipe

One action clears the app: local storage, cached data, everything. If you need to disappear from a circle fast, this is the button.

App lock

Optional passcode lock encrypts your circle secret at rest, with the passcode stretched by Argon2id (64 MiB, three passes) so every guess costs an attacker real memory. Where the device supports it, your fingerprint or face opens the vault through the Android Keystore, which never leaves the secure hardware on your phone.

Circles, plural

Keep one circle for family and another for the friends you split up from at a fair or a concert. Switch with a tap on the circle name. Every circle has its own key and its own identity, so even the relay cannot tell your groups apart.

SOS and check-ins

Hold to fire an SOS that your circle sees immediately. Check in with a status without leaving your location on all the time.

Live sharing that keeps running

The Android app keeps sharing your location while your screen is off, with a persistent notification the whole time so it is…