Questions

Opalo is a private iPhone app with two halves. You send a photo or video to one person or a small group and they see it once. What you want to keep goes into a private journal, or a shared one with a few people who were there. No feed, no followers, no ads. Free.

Yes. Opalo is free, with no ads and no in-app purchases. Nothing you can do in it today costs money, and your moments are not the product. If that ever has to change, you will hear it from me first, in plain words.

Not yet. Opalo is for iPhone and needs iOS 26.2 or later. Android is the request I get most and it is on the list, but I am one person and would rather do it properly than quickly. Leave your email on the homepage, tick Android, and I will tell you the day it lands.

Yes. The people you send to need Opalo on their iPhone. There is no invite quota and no gate: you can sign up, set up your journal and look around on your own, then invite people when you are ready. Everyone gets a personal invite link to send however they normally talk to their friends.

13 or older. There are no public profiles and no way for a stranger to find or contact you, so the only people who can reach you are the ones you chose to add.

Only the person or the small group you sent it to. There is no feed, no followers and no public profile, so nothing you send is visible to anyone else. Nobody can browse their way to you.

Opalo does not block screenshots and does not tell you about them. No iPhone app can truly prevent a screenshot, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. What Opalo does is make saving impossible inside the app: no download, no forward, no camera roll. Send to people you trust, the way you would in real life.

They open it once. After they close it they have 60 seconds to watch it again, as many times as they like inside that minute. When the minute is up, the moment is gone from their phone and from our servers.

An unopened moment waits 14 days, then expires on its own and is deleted from our servers. On your side it shows as no longer available, so you are not left guessing whether it was seen.

They can open it once, watch it again inside the 60-second window, and reply to you in the chat. They cannot save it to their camera roll, download it or forward it to anyone. Once the window closes it is gone from their side too.

Yes. Once a sent moment has been seen and its 60-second replay window has closed, the file is removed from our servers, not just hidden from view. There is no archive of sent moments and no copy kept for later. The details are in the privacy policy.

Sending is for someone else, and it disappears. Saving is for you, and it stays. Your personal journal is private to you. A shared journal is a small album a few people add to together, for a trip or a friendship, and only its members can see it.

No. Your personal journal is stored on your phone and, when iCloud backup is on, backed up to your own iCloud, where I cannot see it. A shared journal lives on our servers so its members can see it, and only the people you added can open it.

Your chats, friends and shared journals live on our servers and come back when you sign in on the new phone. Your personal journal is stored on your phone and backed up to your iCloud when iCloud backup is on, so keep it on. Opalo is new and I say so in the app: back up anything you cannot lose, and write to me if something looks missing after a move.

Yes. In Settings, under iCloud & Data, Export All Media saves everything in your journals to Photos or to Files. Nothing is locked in.

No. There are no followers, no likes, no view counts, no feed and no algorithm deciding what you see. Opalo is a sending app and a saving app, not a posting app. It sits somewhere between a group chat and a diary.

No. Opalo never asks for your contacts and does not upload your address book. You add people by invite link, one at a time, on purpose.

It is deleted, not paused. Your account, your chats and anything still waiting to be seen are removed from our servers when you confirm in Settings. There is no reactivation window, so export your journal first if you want to keep it.

One person. I am Julietta Daidone, a designer and developer in London, and Opalo has no team, no investors and no ads. The site you are on, opaloapp.com, is its official home. The longer story is on the About page.