What we don't build
These are missing features. We are listing them as missing features — if one of them is what you came for, another app is the right answer and we will name it.
Most apps publish a roadmap. This is the opposite document: the things that will never be on ours, and the reasoning, so that you can judge the reasoning rather than wait for a feature that is not coming.
It exists for a practical reason. The single most common thing people tell us about their last family app is that it had everything, and opening it became one more job. An app is not calm because of its colour scheme. It is calm because someone decided what it would refuse to do, wrote that down, and then held to it when the feature requests arrived.
Family chat
Not building it. Ever.
Messages inside an organizer stop being messages. They become a record — the one people go back to when there is a disagreement about who agreed to what. And that record does not sit neutrally between two parents: it sits under whoever holds the account and pays the subscription. That asymmetry is invisible while everything is fine and it matters enormously when it is not, which is precisely when a family most needs its shared tools to be even-handed.
The practical case is simpler still. Your family already has WhatsApp, iMessage or Signal. All three are better at messaging than a calendar app will ever be, all three are already where the grandparents are, and none of them puts the thread under one household member's payment method.
If you want it: FamilyWall has a built-in messenger and is a genuinely good all-in-one.
Location tracking of family members
Not building it. Ever.
We are not going to hold a live map of where your children are. Not because it is hard, but because holding it creates a thing that can be breached, subpoenaed, sold in an acquisition, or quietly repurposed by whoever owns this company in ten years. The most reliable protection for a piece of data is that it was never collected.
There is also an honest point about consent inside families. A location feature in a shared app is rarely a mutual arrangement between equals; it is usually one person watching another, and it does not stop being that when the person watched is fifteen.
If you want it: iOS has location sharing between family members built in, free, with no third company in the middle — which is strictly better than us doing it. FamilyWall also offers it with zone alerts.
Photo galleries and the family journal
Not building it.
iCloud Photos and Google Photos won this, completely and years ago. A family photo feature inside an organizer means a worse gallery, a second copy of your pictures, a much larger and more sensitive thing for us to hold, and a bigger bill that arrives in your subscription. There is no version of this where we are the right place for your children's photographs.
Meal planning, recipes, budgeting, health tracking
Not building any of them.
Each is a reasonable product and none is this product. Together they are the exact mechanism by which a calm app becomes a twelve-module dashboard: every one is defensible on its own, and the twelfth arrives without anyone having decided to build a dashboard.
Health tracking gets a separate line because it is not merely scope creep. Vaccination records and medication schedules are special-category data under GDPR, they carry obligations well beyond a shared shopping list, and a family organizer is the wrong container for them.
If you want them: Nori goes furthest into meals and groceries; FamilyWall has a budget and a meal planner.
Third-party analytics and advertising SDKs
Not adding them. This one is structural.
There is no Google Analytics, Firebase, Mixpanel, Amplitude or Segment in the app, no advertising SDK, and no cookies or tracking script on this website. Not a reduced amount — none.
The reason is that an analytics SDK is not a measurement tool you install, it is a second company you invite into every screen your family opens. What it sends, and when that changes, is decided by them in an update you will never read about. We measure the sign-up and subscription funnel on our own servers, and we read our own web-server log with visitor IP addresses truncated before they are written to disk. That is enough to run a business and it is all of it, written up in the privacy policy.
Hosting outside the EU
Not doing it, including US-owned clouds with EU regions.
Servers are Hetzner in Germany and Scaleway in France — European companies on European soil. AWS, Google Cloud and Azure are excluded even when they offer an EU region, because the parent company remains subject to US law that can reach data it holds regardless of where the disk is. You may consider that risk theoretical. The point is that it is a decision made once, in public, rather than a default nobody examined.
There is one deliberate exception and we would rather list it than be caught with it: Apple's push notification service is US-based, as it must be to deliver a notification to an iPhone at all. It is named in the privacy policy along with every other sub-processor.
Things we would build, but haven't
To keep the line honest, these are ordinary gaps rather than refusals — they are missing because we are one developer and time is finite, not because of a principle:
- Android. Genuinely planned. Today this rules us out for any family that is not all on iPhone, and that is a real and current cost, not a footnote.
- A web version. Also planned, also not here.
- Sign in with Google or Apple. Email and password at launch; social sign-in adds an identity provider into a flow we would rather keep small, but this is a judgement call rather than a principle, and it may change.
How to hold us to this
A promise about restraint is worth exactly as much as your ability to leave when it breaks. So the real guarantee is not this page — it is the export button: your calendar as .ics, your lists as CSV, the whole account as JSON, available from your first day and not conditional on a support conversation.
If a future version of this app ships a chat tab and a location map, this page will be evidence, and you will already have everything you need to walk. We would rather be held to that than ask to be trusted.
Questions
Is there a family organizer without location tracking?
This one. No tracking of any kind, no map, nothing held about where anyone is, and no plan to add it. If you want family location sharing, iOS does it natively and better.
Why won't you just add chat? Everyone else has it.
Because a shared record of a family's conversations, owned by whoever holds the subscription, is a liability we are not willing to create for you or for us — and because your family already has three better messengers on their phones right now.
Aren't you just describing missing features as virtues?
Partly, yes — that is what this genre of page usually is, and it is fair to be suspicious of it. Which is why the list above names the competitor to buy for each thing we refuse, and why our round-up of the field spells out the cases where we are the wrong choice. If the refusals do not suit you, the honest outcome is that you use something else.
What happens if the company is sold?
The most likely way any of this changes is exactly that, which is a fair thing to ask a one-year-old company. We cannot bind a future owner with a marketing page. What we can do is make sure you are never trapped: everything you put in comes out in open formats, on demand, without asking us. Take the export early — it is the part of this page that does not depend on our intentions.
Somiya is a family organizer that answers one question — what's next, and who is doing something about it. Photograph the school letter and it becomes the right task for the right person. No ads, no trackers, encrypted on your phone and on EU servers. €9.99 a month or €59.99 a year for up to 8 people, 14-day free trial.
Think one of these refusals is wrong? Tell us why: hello@somiya.app. We will not necessarily change our minds, but the reasoning above is meant to be arguable rather than decorative.