Kiekie

Kiekie is Afrikaans for a snapshot. Once a day, at a random moment in each member’s own local day, everyone in a family group gets the same nudge: show your family what you are doing right now. The photos collect into a daily collage only the family can see, and over a year they become an archive of ordinary family life, with a printed yearbook as the payoff.

It is built for South African families with members abroad. A family WhatsApp group is dominated by two people and the photos scroll away. A daily prompt tells everyone what to post and makes participation even, so Ouma sees your office and you see her stoep.

Principles

Connection, not content: no feed, no likes, no algorithm, emoji reactions only. Missed days are forgiven, so there are no streaks. People own their photos and can export them at any time, and the core app stays free.

How it is built

Flutter, because the families are on low-end Android in South Africa and iPhones in London, and both have to work from day one. The prompt is the product, so the two hard parts are push delivery and keeping photo storage cheap. The first piece built was a pure, tested scheduler that picks a random moment inside each member’s waking day in their own timezone, including across daylight-saving changes.

Status

MVP in progress: the app runs on Android and iOS, and backend and push work come next before a beta with a handful of families.