Start with one friend in the same room: Sanct is live on the App Store in Singapore, with Indonesia and Malaysia to follow on 30 September

SINGAPORE – At 6pm today, a small beach opens on iPhones across Singapore. There is a fire to sit by, a shore to walk along, a picnic table by the lake, and whoever in your circle decides to come. It closes again at the end of the evening, and it opens again tomorrow at six.

The beach is called the Sanctum, and it is inside Sanct, a social app for close friends and family that went live on the App Store in Singapore on Monday and arrives in Indonesia and Malaysia on Wednesday, where pre-orders are already open. The app is free to download, has no ads and has no public feed.

Start with one friend in the same room

Sanct begins differently from other social apps. A new user's first friends are added by meeting in person and scanning each other's QR code. Search and friend suggestions open only after five friends, and reach only friends of friends. The result is a circle made up of people the user actually knows.

Getting started takes three steps:

1. Download Sanct through sanct.social.

2. Meet a friend or someone in your family, and scan each other's QR code.

3. At 6pm, walk into the Sanctum together.

"Don't download Sanct for yourself," said Mr Sion Abednego, founder of Sanct. "Download it with the one person you would call if your day went wrong. Scan each other, and meet at the beach at six. If that friendship does not feel a little closer after a week, we have not done our job. Sanct is only the bridge. The people are the point."

A day on Sanct

Inside the circle, the app follows a day. It starts with a good-morning screen that shows the night's rest. There are group chats for family and close friends with reactions, voice and video calls, and check-ins at real places that only the circle can see. Every moment a user shares has an audience they choose: everyone in their circle, selected friends, or only themselves. At night, a sleep check-in lets friends see when someone is asleep.

Sancty, the small companion inside the app, is there when a user needs company. She asks about breakfast, and she can remind a user that their usual sleep time is close. Her habit reminders are optional and switched off by default.

How user data is handled

Sanct 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's privacy policy is published at https://sanctsocial.app/privacy

Price and availability

Sanct 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, and from Wednesday 30 September in Indonesia and Malaysia, which will complete its first three launch countries. Pre-orders are open in both. The Android version on Google Play is not ready yet.

Sanct Social Pte. Ltd. is registered in Singapore. More than 1,600 people joined the waiting list during its closed beta, which opened in Jakarta on 23 August, and earlier this month the start-up ran its first Singapore booth at Tech in Asia Conference 2026. Its short film series about a family living between Jakarta and Singapore, now four episodes long, is on YouTube at https://youtu.be/vQDq1H09RVg?si=wT0Zqs_j5NoIBrCa.

Sanct can be downloaded through https://sanct.social, which leads to the App Store.