Friends on Sanct Social are added by meeting in person: Episode 6 follows one day in Jakarta with friends from Singapore and Malaysia

SINGAPORE – In an airport arrival hall in Jakarta, two young women who have never met give each other a small, awkward wave. Then one lifts her phone, and the other lifts hers. The two phones meet in the air like two glasses. A moment later, one phone shows a card with the other woman's name, and under it a button: "Add friend".

That is how a friendship starts on Sanct Social, and how "Nice to meet you." starts, the sixth film in the series by the Singapore-registered start-up, released on YouTube on Monday 12 October. The first five films followed one family living between Jakarta and Singapore. The sixth opens the other half of the app: friends.

A fifth friend by the end of the day

The story is set on Saturday 10 October. Keisha, who came home in Episode 5, meets two friends from Singapore at the airport: Dennis, and Rivani, who is from Malaysia. Rivani is new on Sanct Social and has three friends in it. On Sanct Social, friend search and some other features open only when a user has five friends, and the app says so itself with a small card: "Sancty keeps this one cozy ... 4 of 5 friends — keep going!"

The film follows that number through the day. Clarissa, Keisha's sister, becomes the fourth friend at the airport. The fifth arrives at lunch, running and out of breath: Raka, who is late. Two phones meet again, this time over steaming bowls of meatball soup.

Between the two meetings, the film shows the app through what the five of them do, with no spoken lines. Four people point in four directions for lunch, so Keisha opens a poll with four choices in the group "Jakarta, one day", and the votes come in one by one, including Raka's from the road. Keisha sends a Sancty sticker, "Wow!". Raka records a voice note while he runs, and the whole table leans in over one phone and laughs. After lunch Raka photographs the four of them in the camera's Stereoscopic mode: in the feed the picture moves when the phone is tilted, and five heads tilt with it.

A call from Malaysia

At dusk Rivani's phone rings. On the screen: "Amma", her mother in Malaysia, a voice call. Rivani answers, then takes the phone from her ear and taps once. On her mother's phone the app asks: "Rivani wants to switch to video. Your camera stays off until you accept." Her mother taps "Turn on video". Five faces squeeze into one screen and wave. The mother's hand goes to her chest. Her face is never shown.

The friends' last scene is simple: five phones, face down, in a pile on a wall. Nobody is looking at a screen.

"Five of our films were about a family. In the sixth we show the thing that makes Sanct Social different, and it does not happen on a screen. It happens between two people standing in front of each other," said Mr Sion Abednego, founder of Sanct Social. "First friends on Sanct Social are added in person. So everyone on your phone is someone you have really met. Rivani's mother in Malaysia sees five faces, and she knows who her daughter is with."

The film closes on Sancty, the small companion inside the app, with a small bow, as if meeting someone for the first time, and one line on screen: "Nice to meet you." She then holds up a white card with a QR code. The code is real: anyone who points a phone at the screen lands on sanct.social.

What is real in the film

Every app screen in the film comes from the Sanct Social app as it is today, rebuilt only for the characters' names, photos, messages and times. Seven features appear: adding a friend by scanning each other's QR code in person (friends can also be added with an invite code or through an introduction from a mutual friend); the five-friend start, after which search and friend suggestions open and reach friends of friends; a poll inside a chat, with choices that can be added; a voice note; a Sancty sticker in a chat; a Stereoscopic photo that moves when the phone is tilted; and a voice call that becomes a video call only after the other side agrees.

How user data is handled

Sanct Social has no ads and no public feed, and it does not sell user data to third parties. Sancty processes data only inside the user's own account in order to respond, and this data is not used to train public AI models. Sanct Social's privacy policy is published at https://sanctsocial.app/privacy

Price and availability

Sanct Social is free: core features stay free, and optional premium features will follow, with no ads in either. It is available for iPhone on the App Store in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. The Android version on Google Play is not ready yet. The app is available in English, Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi, and more than 1,000 people are already on the platform. All six episodes of the film series are on YouTube.

Sanct Social can be downloaded through https://sanct.social