Sanct is now live in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia: the social app that asks you to start with five people

SINGAPORE – Name the five people you are closest to. For many people in Singapore, not all five live here. One may be a mother in Johor Bahru, another a sister working in Jakarta, another a friend from school who moved to Kuala Lumpur.

From Wednesday 30 September, all of them can be on the same app. Sanct, the Singapore-registered social app for close friends and family, went live on the App Store in Malaysia and Indonesia that day, two days after Singapore, completing its first three launch countries. It is free to download and has no ads.

The timing matters because of how Sanct starts. New users are asked to first bring in five people who are close to them. Until a user has five friends, some features stay closed: friend search, friend suggestions, Memoji and the Verse menu. When the fifth person joins, everything opens.

Five people, wherever they live

"Sanct does not ask you to collect many people. It asks for five who really know you," said Mr Sion Abednego, founder of Sanct. "For a lot of us in Singapore, some of those five are in Malaysia or Indonesia. Now they can download it too, so you can start with the right people."

A friend can be added in three ways: by meeting in person and scanning each other's QR code in the app, with an invite code, or through an introduction from a friend who is already on Sanct. The invite code also works when the two people are in different countries, so a user in Singapore can add family in Malaysia or Indonesia without waiting for the next visit. After five friends, search and friend suggestions open, and they reach friends of friends. Nobody beyond that can be added.

A five-minute guide to the first day

New users do not have to work the app out by themselves. Sanct has published a five-minute video guide on YouTube, presented by Sancty, the small companion inside the app. She shows how to sign up, how to bring in the first five people, and what each of the five menus is for. In the guide, a character named Clarissa adds her people one at a time, and the fifth is her mother, at the dinner table at home. The video is in English.

Signing up takes an email address and a code sent to it, or a Google or Apple account. From the first day, a user can share a moment in five ways (a photo or video, a thought as a note or a poll, a check-in at a place, the music they are listening to, and a good-night check-in), and chooses who sees each one: all their friends, selected friends, or only themselves. There are chats for one friend or a whole family, with voice and video calls. Every day at 6pm the Sanctum opens, a small beach inside the app.

Sancty can also remind a user about their routines and plans, such as a meal or a time to rest. 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, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Android version on Google Play is not ready yet. The app is available in English, Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi.

Five thousand people are already on the platform. Sanct's short film series about a family living between Jakarta and Singapore, now four episodes long, is on YouTube at 

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