The app

Phone cameras got really good at taking the risk out of a photo. You see the shot before you take it, check it after, take it again. Somewhere in there a picture stopped being a memory and started being something you manage.

Stills puts the risk back. A roll is 12 or 27 frames. You don't see them, you can't retake them, and you can't quietly delete the bad one before anyone else does. When the roll's done it develops, and you find out what you got.

It changes how you shoot. You actually aim, because you get one go. You take photos of stuff you'd normally scroll past. And weeks later you find a frame you completely forgot taking — that's the whole point.

How it develops

Every frame runs through Stills 400 — warm highlights, real grain, halation around bright light. It runs on your phone in about a second. No server, no upload, no queue.

You watch it happen. Prints come up in the darkroom one at a time, in the order you shot them. Long version here.

Your photos stay on your phone

No upload, no cloud library, no copy of your roll sitting on a server. Search runs on the device, so asking for "that night we walked home in the rain" gets answered by your own phone. Nobody else is looking.

Two things do leave, and you trigger both. Tapping Report on a bad search result sends what you typed and a few frame ids — never the photos. And a message to a friend goes through our server and is deleted the moment their phone picks it up. Messages aren't end-to-end encrypted. The app privacy policy lists every exception instead of rounding them off.

Friends, in person

You add someone by holding your phones together. Nobody to search for, no requests from randoms. If you weren't in the same room, you're not connected.

The short version