A beacon is a signal you post to let your friends know you're free and open to hanging out. You can add a mood, describe what you're up to or looking for, and choose who can see it. Choose an audience of all friends, a specific group, or just a few people.
Beacons expire automatically. You set the duration when you post, anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours, so your feed always reflects what's happening right now.
There are three ways to find and add friends on Beak:
Username search: Search for someone directly if you know their username.
Phone contacts: Beak can check which of your contacts are already on the app. Grant contacts permission and we'll show you who's there. Your contacts are never uploaded or stored on our servers.
Invite link: If a friend shares their invite link with you, tapping it will take you straight to their profile so you can add them, no searching required.
All friend requests must be accepted before either of you can see each other's beacons.
Notifications are off by default and enabled on a per-friend basis, so you're in control of whose beacons actually alert you. To get notified when someone posts, turn on notifications for that friend from their profile. You can enable or disable this for as many or as few friends as you like.
You'll also need to allow Beak to send notifications in your device settings for any of this to work.
Only the people you choose. When you post a beacon, you select an audience. This can be all your friends, a friend group you've created, or specific individuals. Nobody outside that selection can see your beacon.
When you post a beacon, you choose exactly who sees it. Your options are:
Your audience choice is set each time you post, so you can share different beacons depending on what you're up to and who you'd like to connect with.
Audience settings are one of the most useful things to get right in Beak, and groups are the best way to do it.
Not every beacon is for everyone. Maybe you're up for grabbing a coffee with your closest friends, but not looking to make plans with acquaintances. Maybe you want to let your coworkers know you're free for lunch without broadcasting that to everyone you know. Groups let you draw those lines clearly and post to exactly the right people without thinking about it every time.
On the flip side, sometimes you're genuinely open to anything, and posting to all friends is the right call. The flexibility is the point. Beak is most useful when your audience reflects how you actually feel in that moment, allowing for more organic connection.
We recommend spending a few minutes setting up a group or two for the circles you hang out with most. It makes posting faster and means the people who see your beacon are the people most likely to actually respond to it.
Not in the way you might expect. We never track your location in the background, store, or display your precise coordinates. If you grant location permission, your device's GPS is used only to determine your general city or area, which is then attached to your beacon.
Once permission is granted, your general area is included on every beacon you post. We recommend this, it's one of the more useful parts of Beak. If you'd prefer certain people not see your location, the right move is to narrow your audience rather than turn off location entirely. This allows you to stay visible to the people you're comfortable with.
You can revoke Beak's location permission at any time in your device settings.
We highly recommend enabling location. It's one of the more useful features in Beak. Friends can sort their feed by distance, so they can quickly see who's nearby and whether an in-person meetup is actually realistic. That context is what takes a beacon from "I'm free" to a real plan without all of the back and forth logistics.
It's worth knowing that once location permission is granted, your general area is included on every beacon you post. If there are people on your friends list you'd rather not share your location with, the better solution is to use your audience settings by posting to a group or specific people you're comfortable with, rather than all friends.
You can enable it anytime from your iPhone's Settings app.
Once that's set, your general area will be included on beacons you post, and friends will be able to sort by distance. If you ever want to turn it off again, the same steps will get you back here.
Absolutely. Distance doesn't change the core problem Beak solves: knowing when your friends are actually free. That's just as hard to figure out when someone lives across the country as it is when they live across town.
There are plenty of ways to connect with people remotely: a quick phone call, a video chat, or playing a game together online. The hard part is usually finding a moment when both of you are available and in the right headspace. That's exactly what a beacon communicates.
When you post, you can choose interests that make sense for connecting virtually and your long distance friends will know you're free and what you're open to. The rest is up to you.
Your discoverability settings give you control over how people can search for you. You can choose to be findable by username, by phone number, both, or neither, and you can change this any time in your account settings.
If you have strict search settings and want to give a specific friend a direct way to connect with you, that's what your invite code is for. Sharing your invite link lets someone find and add you without needing to search at all.
If your invite code ever gets out in a way you didn't intend, you can refresh it from your settings. Refreshing your invite code voids the old link immediately, so only people you share the new one with can use it.
A beacon should be intentional and mean you're actively intending to connect. If your status could linger indefinitely, it would quickly stop being useful. Your friends wouldn't know if you were actually free right now or just hadn't cleared something from days ago.
The expiration keeps the feed honest. We want Beak to reflect what people are up to today, not a stale snapshot of whenever they last opened the app.
Yes. You can take down your beacon at any time from the app. Once deleted, it disappears from your friends' feeds immediately. Don't let the idea of committing to a status stop you from posting. If your plans change or you're no longer free, just remove it.
No, you can only have one active beacon at a time. This is intentional. A beacon is meant to represent how you're feeling and what you're open to right now, and having multiple active at once would muddy that signal. If your situation changes, update or replace your current beacon rather than stacking them.
No. Beak does not track or display beacon views. You won't know who has seen your beacon, and nobody can see whether you've looked at theirs. The feed is designed to be low-pressure.
Not currently. We use a curated list rather than free-form text to keep the experience consistent and safe. Open-ended fields would require ongoing moderation that we'd rather avoid.
That said, we're continuously reviewing and expanding the lists to cover more of what people are actually into. If something feels missing, we want to hear about it.
We collect only what's necessary to run the app: your name, username, phone number, and the content of your beacons. We don't sell your data, and we don't use it for advertising.
For full details on what we collect, how we store it, and your rights, see our Privacy Policy.
We felt like something had gone wrong with social media. Most platforms are built around the assumption that you're always available. You're always online, always reachable, always scrolling. That's exhausting, and it doesn't reflect how people actually want to spend their time.
Beak flips that. You decide when you're available and what you're open to. When you are, you post a beacon. When you're not, you don't. Your friends see your status in real time, and you see theirs. No algorithm, no noise, no feed to get lost in.
We also think social apps have spent too long optimizing for engagement at the expense of actual connection. Beak is designed to get people together, then get out of the way. It's a tool for making plans, not a place to spend your afternoon.
We're still early, and we have a lot we want to build. But that's the north star.
© Beak. All rights reserved.