The beta is out.

Welcome to the Stills beta. It exists so the bugs happen to a few dozen people in August rather than to everyone on the 28th — and so the app arrives having been used by someone other than the person who wrote it.

What is in the build

A camera that will not show you anything

Load a roll of 12 or 27, shoot it, and get nothing back until it is full. No preview, no retakes, no deleting the bad one. The viewfinder is a real one though: tap to focus, hold to lock it, drag the sun to set exposure, and there is a grid, a level, a timer and flash if you want them. Volume buttons work as a shutter. So does the Camera Control button.

The darkroom

Finished rolls land here as canisters. Develop one and watch it come up — that part is not a loading spinner, it is the actual process running on your phone at about a second a frame.

One film, and only one

Stills 400 is the house look and the whole roster: warm golden mids, honey highlights over a matte toe, amber halation around anything bright enough to earn it, and a fine two-octave grain that is still there at thumbnail size.

There is no switcher and no restock, and that is a decision rather than a gap. A disposable camera does not let you pick the emulsion after you have shot the frame, and the moment a roll has six possible looks the question stops being “what did I catch” and starts being “which one of these is best” — which is the reviewing habit the whole app exists to break. It is also why the grade is applied as the roll develops rather than offered as a filter afterwards.

Memories, and search that actually works

Every developed frame lands in Memories. Search it in plain English — “that night we walked home in the rain”, “beach, last summer” — and it finds them. That search runs entirely on your phone. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is indexed on a server, and the person who made this could not read your library if he wanted to.

Dailies

One frame a day keeps a run going. The contact sheet shows the fortnight, the calendar shows the year, and your profile keeps the whole habit as a chart you can scrub through.

Presence

Hold two phones together and you are friends. No usernames to guess, no requests from strangers. Frames pass directly between the two phones and never touch a server.

Backups

Settings, then Account & data, then Back up everything gives you one file. It is encrypted to your account, so only you can restore it. Take one before you install a new beta build.

Known and deliberate

Rolls is locked

It is where a roll becomes an album you can name and shoot into with a friend. It works — it just is not stable enough to hand over yet, and the sharing half needs the same pass Presence has just had. The screen says so when you tap it. Nothing is waiting behind it: every frame you shoot is safe in Memories either way.

Presence has no messaging

You can add people and see their profile. That is the whole of it for now.

Rough edges in the darkroom are expected

If something in there feels wrong, that is exactly the sort of thing worth sending.

What is coming

Next. Rolls unlocked — shared albums you can shoot into together. A home screen widget for your streak and the roll you are filling. Messaging in Presence, so a frame someone hands you can come with a word attached.

After that. More films, faster developing on older phones, and a long list of polish: better transitions, better empty states, and the hundred small things that only turn up once real people are using it.

Always. Whatever gets reported.

“Next” and “after that” are an order, not a schedule. The only date promised anywhere is August 28, 2026, the day Stills reaches the App Store.

What to send back

Three things, in order of how much they help:

1. Anything that made you hesitate, even for a second, even if you cannot say why. This is the most useful thing a beta tester can send and the one people send least.
2. Any photo that developed wrong — the frame, and roughly when you shot it.
3. Anything that crashed.

In the app: Settings, then About & Legal, then Contact support. It writes to a person directly and attaches your build number. From TestFlight: take a screenshot and tap Share Beta Feedback, which carries the build automatically. Or use the support form on this site and pick “Beta feedback”.

The fine print worth reading

Beta builds are pre-release software. They may be unstable, features may be incomplete or locked, and data created in a beta build can be lost between versions. Take a backup before you install one, and treat a beta as something to test rather than something to depend on. The terms of use say this in the language lawyers prefer.

Your photographs still never leave the phone. The beta is not a different privacy model with a looser setting. Developing, search, captions and recaps all run on the device; the only things that sync are your profile and the cover frames you deliberately choose. The app privacy policy has the full list.

It is free, and it stays free through the beta. There is no advertising in Stills and there never will be.

Still deciding

The FAQ answers the short questions, About explains why the app makes you wait in the first place, and Updates is where each build gets written up. If none of those covers it, [email protected] reaches a person.