Shout

The brief

It is easy to claim work is production quality. We wanted something we could point at. So we set ourselves the hardest brief we had: a location-based social app for our own town, built end to end and published on the App Store with Own Time Studios Ltd listed as the provider. Shout Social Media Limited operates it. We build it.

The idea is simple and local. Shout is a live map of the town: who has gone live nearby, what people are saying, and the plans taking shape around them. It began in Southend-on-Sea and is switched on one area at a time, so that, as the site puts it, the day it reaches you the map already has people on it. It is free and for adults aged 18 and over. Inside one product sits a stack of hard problems: live location, voice, chat, maps, events, notifications, moderation and privacy. The patterns we prove here go into client work.

What we built

Shout is an iPhone app on the App Store today, listed as Shout Social Media. Everything hangs off a live map. Go live and you appear on it until you stop or the session times out. Shouts are short text or voice posts pinned to a place. Events run public, unlisted or invite-only for up to 50 people, with RSVPs, a discussion thread and a share link that opens on a web page without an account. Hangouts are two to eight people and a group chat that winds down when it is over. Discover suggests a short list of people each day, Crossed Paths stays off until you switch it on, and Looking Now lets anyone nearby message you for an hour with no connection needed. An assistant sits inside the map, and local offers come from cafés, bars and studios.

The website at shoutsocialmedia.app is the public face. The homepage is one long scroll. The hero line is 'Your town, out loud', set beside a screenshot of the live map over Southend. Four numbered features follow, from the map and going live to hangouts and Discover, each with a tilted phone screenshot. Six more run as a list, from shouts to local offers, each with a one-line fact. Three sticky step cards sit under the heading 'Three steps. One of them is outdoors.' After that come six safety and privacy points, a 'Started by the sea' section with a nominate-your-town link, a section for local businesses, an eight-question FAQ and a closing call to download. The solid button goes to the App Store. There are no forms anywhere.

Behind the homepage sit three legal pages: a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and child safety standards, each with a sticky numbered contents on larger screens. The privacy policy sets out what is collected, how location works in detail, how the AI features are handled, a retention table and a table of the companies that help run the service. The terms cover who can use Shout, where it works, community rules, events and hangouts, and business offers and orders. The child safety page states a zero-tolerance policy and how to report. The homepage's business section lists a profile on the map, Offers, Boosts, Orders and Events, all set up from inside the app. Unless the app says otherwise, Shout does not take payment; the customer pays the business directly.

The details that mattered

• 01

  Every live feature carries its own clock, and the site says so in numbers. Text shouts fade in 12 hours and voice in 24. A live session ends itself after no more than three hours, Looking Now times out after an hour, and Crossed Paths location points are deleted after 48 hours.

• 02

  The pin other members see while you are live is offset by a random distance of tens of metres, and the offset stays consistent for the session so it cannot be averaged away. You appear on the map when you choose to go live, never by default. Every report lands with a human moderator, and every moderation action goes into an audit log.

• 03

  The website runs no analytics or tracking scripts. It stores one item in the browser for the theme and one session flag so the intro plays once. Hello, support, business and nominate-your-town links each open an email with the subject prefilled, and a single address handles the lot.

• 04

  The three legal pages are prerendered to static HTML, each with its own title, description and canonical link, so they render before the site's JavaScript arrives. Each is dated 23 September 2026. The homepage includes the iOS Smart App Banner, and every page is served with HSTS, frame-denial and content-type security headers.

• 05

  The look is editorial: warm off-white with indigo and hot pink, Instrument Serif for headlines, italic emphasis and the section numbers, Instrument Sans for body text and JetBrains Mono for the small uppercase labels and the numbering on the legal pages. Light and dark themes follow the system and can be switched, and the intro curtain and scroll animations switch off for anyone who prefers reduced motion. Even the 404 stays in character: 'There's nothing pinned at this address.'