A summon is a place, a time, and a list of who is coming.

An app for small groups who arrange to meet in person. Someone drops a pin with a clock on it, the people in that circle answer, and the invite ends by itself when the clock runs out.

Download on the App Store On iPhone now
Get it on Google Play Closed alpha. How to join
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For now, Summoner is available only in Bulgaria.

📍 Happening now
Drinks at The Anchor
Friday Night Crew · ends 23:30
😎 🔥 ⚡
3 going

The buttons work.

Inside the app

Summons

An invite with an expiry date

Set what is happening and for how long, anywhere from 15 minutes to 24 hours. Everyone taps going or passes. When the time is up it ends by itself and moves into the circle's history, so there is nothing to cancel and no dead event left in the chat next week.

21:00
Jordan drops a pin at The Anchor
The card goes to the top of everyone's circles list
21:04
Three people are in
The count moves on every phone at the same time
22:15
One more joins on the way there
23:30
Expired
The card leaves the list and the shared link stops working

On the way

Who is coming, and how far off they are

In a circle, say you are going and everyone else in it can see how far you are from the place, in a straight line. Your phone does the maths and publishes one number: the distance. It sends us no coordinates and no route.

Not a countdown, deliberately. The same trip is eight minutes by car and thirty-five on foot, so a shared arrival time is wrong for whoever is not travelling the way it assumed. Metres are the same number however you cover them. It is a reading from when that person last checked, so it disappears after half an hour rather than going stale in front of you.

Going · 4
😎 Jordan Arrived
🔥 Sam 2.4 km
⚡ Riley 18 km
🙂 You

What the server holds for this summon: four usernames and three distances.

Consensus summons

When nobody can agree on where

Propose up to four spots instead of picking one, and let the circle vote. At the deadline the server decides, not your phone, and the winner becomes an ordinary summon.

Vote on where Closes 20:30
Drinks, 3 hours
The Anchor 4
Bar Vertigo 2
The Lighthouse 1

Seven in the circle, seven votes cast.

Circles

Group chats that count who turned up

A group chat with one extra thing: a leaderboard of how many summons each person turned up to, which everyone in the circle can see. Turning up is the only thing it counts.

Friday Night Crew · attended
😎 Jordan 14
🔥 Sam 11
⚡ Riley 8
😴 Casey 1

Your data

What is stored, and in what form

Not everything here is encrypted the same way. One-to-one chats are end-to-end encrypted and circle chats are not: a circle is a group conversation we store in readable form, the same as any other. Your phone generates the keys for the private ones. One copy goes to your profile, locked with a recovery key that never leaves your phone, so a new phone can get your chats back; we cannot open it.

The privacy policy has the full version.

Private one-to-one messages
Encrypted on your device. We hold ciphertext and no key.
Circle messages and photos
Stored readable on our servers. Not end-to-end encrypted.
Your encryption keys
Generated on the phone. A copy locked with your recovery key is kept so a new phone can restore your chats; we cannot open it.
Summon location
The coordinates you picked, kept with the summon.
How far away you are
One distance in metres. No coordinates, no route. Gone after 30 minutes.
Your live position
Never stored. It is read on the device and discarded.
Everything in transit
TLS.

Shared links

One link for people who don't have the app

Every circle summon has a link that opens the app if you have it and a page if you don't. The link stops working when the summon ends, so nothing permanent is left behind.

summoner-app.com/summon?id=…
Drinks at The Anchor
In Friday Night Crew
4 going 2h 30m left

Discover

Summons open to people you don't know yet

Post a summon anyone nearby can find and join, rather than only the circle you chose. It is on in the app, and it will stay quiet until there are people near you using it.

A public summon never carries its real address. Strangers see a circle, and the true point sits somewhere inside it, equally likely to be anywhere. Our server widens that circle in emptier places, from 800 metres in a city to 5 km in the countryside, and hands out the exact spot only once you have joined. You must be 18 to use any of this.

Where the pin is drawn
The true point, hidden until you join
Anywhere in here is possible

Get Summoner

For now, Summoner is available only in Bulgaria.

iPhone

Available

On the App Store, for iOS 15 and later.

Download on the App Store

Android

Closed alpha

In testing on Google Play, for Android 10 and later. We add each tester by hand, so joining takes two steps.

  1. Tell us the Google account you use on your phone. On the contact page, pick General Enquiry.
  2. Once we reply, sign in with that account, open the test page, tap Become a tester, then install Summoner from Google Play.
Get it on Google Play

In your browser

Opening soon

The same app in any browser, on a computer or a phone. It opens to everyone soon. Until then it shows a notice.

Open in yourBrowser