Shout

The brief

Shout is the case study we set ourselves. It is easy to claim your work is production quality; we wanted something we could point at. So we gave ourselves the hardest brief on the shelf: a real-time social app for our own town, built end to end, released on the App Store under our own name, and kept alive with proper updates.

The idea is simple and local. Shout is built for Southend-on-Sea and the surrounding areas, and it exists to get people off their screens and into the same room. See who is out right now. Drop a 15-second voice note on the map. Start a hangout when your usual crowd is busy. Spot the person you keep crossing paths with at the same café. One product, and inside it a whole stack of hard problems: live location, audio, chat, maps, notifications and privacy.

It is also the studio lab. Every pattern we prove here, native releases, real-time data, privacy controls, admin tooling, shows up later in client work. When we tell a client their booking platform or native app will ship properly, Shout is the reason we can say it with a straight face.

What we built

Shout runs across four surfaces: a native iOS app, a native Android app, a web platform and an admin console for running the product day to day. The iOS app is live on the App Store as Shout Social Media, free to download.

At the centre is a live map of Southend. People can go live when they are out and about, with sessions that end after 2 hours. Voice Shouts pin 15-second audio notes to real places and expire after a day. Hangouts let anyone propose a pub quiz, beach volleyball or a last-minute pint and invite others along. Around the map sit Discover, for finding locals who share your interests, Crossed Paths, which shows who you have been near recently, local events, and Local Spots, which surfaces independent businesses, cafés and venues across town.

Sign-in works with Apple, phone or email, and visibility is a switch the user controls, never a default. The latest release added Looking Now: a tab showing everyone who is out and available this very moment, with an Available Now toggle that lasts an hour and a chat flow that lets people say hi without a friend request.

The details that mattered

• 01

  Voice Shouts are capped at 15 seconds and expire after 24 hours. Playback is paired with subtle haptics, so a note feels like a person speaking rather than a file playing.

• 02

  Every live feature carries its own clock: map sessions end after 2 hours and Available Now switches off after one hour. Nothing on the map is ever stale, which is what makes a live map worth trusting.

• 03

  The Looking Now inbox handles a genuinely fiddly edge case. While someone is available you can message them with no friend request, the chat sits in its own inbox, and if you become friends the whole conversation moves into your normal messages automatically.

• 04

  Privacy is a set of real controls, not a policy page. Users choose when they appear on the map, and last-online visibility has three settings: everybody, friends only, or no one.

• 05

  The iOS app downloads at a lean download despite carrying maps, live location, voice playback and chat. That matters for an app people install on a whim.