🔥 invited you to Glimt
Glimt
A calm alternative to Snapchat. For the people you love.
You take a glimt, it goes to the people you chose, and then it gets to disappear. No algorithm, no feed, no strangers. Just the people you said yes to yourself.
Free while Glimt is in beta, and free forever for everyone who joins before launch.
Glimt in twenty seconds
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1
You take a glimt
With the camera inside the app. You cannot send an old picture from your camera roll, and that is on purpose. A glimt is something happening now.
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2
It goes to the people you chose
A friend, a bål, or just yourself, all in one send. You get three seconds to undo. And if you have no signal, the app keeps trying, for a whole week if it has to, and tells you honestly if it gives up.
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3
Then it disappears
Unless you keep it. A glimt opens once, but there is no countdown while you watch: it stays on screen until you tap it away, so you have time to show it to whoever is sitting next to you.
Safety
Safe for children and teenagers
The protection here is not a setting a parent has to go and find. It is the way the app is built: Glimt has nowhere for a stranger to meet your child.
"There is no way for a predator to reach a child they don't already know."
From the child safety policy
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Only the people you said yes to
A glimt can reach you two ways: from a friend whose request you accepted, or from someone sitting at a bål you accepted an invitation to join. Both take a yes from you. There are no messages from strangers.
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No feed, no discovery
Nobody can browse their way to your child, get them recommended, or stumble across them. People are found by exact username only, by someone who already knows what they are called. And you can only invite your own friends into a bål.
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13 and up
You have to give your date of birth when you create an account. If you are younger, the account is never created.
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Report, and get an answer
Anything can be reported inside the app, with four reasons to pick from. Every report reaches me straight away and I look at it well within 24 hours. If three different people report an account, it can no longer post anything new, automatically and without waiting for me.
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Blocking that holds
A block works in both directions and is enforced in the database, not just hidden in the app. Notifications stop too.
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Lock it, and delete it
You can lock the app with Face ID or a fingerprint, and you can delete your whole account yourself, from Settings.
Honest about what is not finished: Glimt can blur nudity automatically on the phone, but it only works on iPhone, and only with Apple's Sensitive Content Warning switched on in iOS Settings. On Android it is coming later. Better you hear it from me than discover it yourself.
Bål
One campfire, once a week
A bål is a little group you give a name and invite your closest people into. You pick a day of the week. On that day everyone shares a vekeglimt, a small glimpse of the week that was.
The vekeglimt has a theme, and every bål in the world gets the same one in the same week. "Something that made you smile." "Your view right now." Plus themes of their own for Christmas, New Year, the 17th of May and midsummer. You do not have to follow the theme, and you do not have to share at all. The fire keeps burning either way.
A vekeglimt can be five things, all equally good
Once a week you pick the shape of your own vekeglimt:
- Film a short video
- Photo a single picture
- Words a few sentences
- Voice say it out loud
- Draw with your finger
The last two are there on purpose. A seven-year-old, or a shy fifteen-year-old, should be able to take part without showing their face.
An ordinary glimt is always the camera, and you answer one with an emoji or a short word, not with one of these five shapes. If you want to say more, swipe up and send a glimt back.
No streaks, no leaderboard
At a bål, reactions are visible, you see who reacted with what, but they are never counted or ranked. Send a glimt to one person and their reaction comes only to you, and it goes away once you have seen it. You lose nothing by skipping a week.
The only number that adds up anywhere is how many glimt you and one friend have shared with each other. It is drawn as a polar bear that changes a little at 5, 30, 150 and 750, and it belongs to that one friendship, not to a list of everyone. And you can draw your own avatar with your finger.
The fire lights up whoever is sitting at it
While you are inside the bål, the others can see you are there. Step out and you are gone. Nothing is written down, no "active 5 minutes ago", and no green dot anywhere in the app. It works both ways, so you cannot watch others without them seeing you, and you never get a notification that someone is there.
Record a vekeglimt with your voice, and the words get written down
It happens on the phone itself, with NB-Whisper, the National Library of Norway's model, trained on 22,000 hours of Norwegian. Nothing leaves the phone to be understood. For Norwegian your phone fetches the model once, 55 MB, and it asks you first.
The text is sealed and travels with the audio. So someone who hears poorly, or not at all, needs no model, no supported language and no capable phone: the words are simply there when the vekeglimt arrives. It works on both iPhone and Android, and you can tap any line to fix it before you share.
Camera
A real film look, not a filter
Phone cameras have become too clean. Glimt has three film simulations: Fjord, bright and airy. Glør, warm and golden. Kol, black and white. They were not downloaded from anywhere, I derived them from my own RAW and JPEG pairs out of a Fujifilm X100VI.
The look is on screen while you shoot, and it is exactly that look that lands in the file. On both iPhone and Android, on stills and on every single frame of a video, and on a vekeglimt just as much as on an ordinary glimt. If you do not want the colour, you can switch it off and keep the grain and the glow in the highlights, or shoot completely clean.
Privacy
Yours, not ours
Your glimt, the text you write on them and your vekeglimt are end-to-end encrypted. Every glimt is encrypted on your phone before it is sent, and sealed separately for every single device your friend has. X25519 and XSalsa20-Poly1305. I cannot open them.
And you do not lose them
Encryption usually means everything is gone once the phone is gone. Not here. Pick a password and your glimt follow you to the next phone. Or do nothing at all: iCloud Keychain and Google Block Store carry the key over for you, without you noticing. I still cannot read any of it.
If a friend gets a new phone, the app says so
When someone switches phone or reinstalls, you are told their key is new, so you can check with them that it really is them. Signal does the same. Snapchat and BeReal do not.
Keep a glimt and it becomes yours
There is no Glimt cloud. If you choose to keep a glimt, it is saved into a "Glimt" album in your phone's own photos. If you have iCloud Photos or Google Photos on, it gets backed up there, with you, not with me. On a photo, the sender's name is written into the file itself (EXIF), so you know who it was from, long afterwards.
Keep a glimt somebody sent you and they are told, exactly like a screenshot. Your own, the one you just took with the camera, you save without anyone being told.
No tracking, no ads, in Europe
There is not a single analytics or advertising tool in the project. Not turned off, not there. Everything is hosted in Europe, in the Nordics, on Supabase. Built in Norway.
To be precise: reactions and the short word replies are stored as ordinary text, everything else is sealed. It is in the privacy policy too.
Who is behind it
A student in Oslo
My name is Pål. I am in my second year of front-end development, I am from Vinje in Telemark and I live in Oslo. Glimt is not a company, it is me, one evening at a time.
I started because we have never been more "connected", and never more alone. I missed a small place where you could hold on to a few people without being measured, counted or sold on. So I tried to build one.
That is also why I dare to promise nobody is buying you here: there is no one else to answer to. The app is available in Norwegian and English.
If you are wondering about something, or want to tell me something is broken, write to paal@dynni.no. I read all of it myself. More about me.
Pricing
What it costs
Nothing, right now. Everything in the app is free while Glimt is in beta.
Later some things, keeping glimt among them, will become part of Glimt+, which will cost money. If you join before launch, you keep those things for free, permanently. You do not have to do anything for it, and you do not have to remember it.
I am saying this now, and not afterwards, because a promise made in advance and a feature taken away from you feel like two completely different things. The only difference is whether anyone said so in time. And if Glimt ever makes money, it will be because someone pays for the app, not because someone pays for you.
Common questions
Who can see my child's glimt?
Only the people your child said yes to: friends they accepted, and the people at a bål your child accepted an invitation to join. Nobody else, not me either. Every glimt is encrypted on the phone before it is sent.
Can strangers get in touch?
No. There is no feed, no discovery and no recommendations. Someone has to know your exact username, and you have to say yes, either to the friend request or to an invitation into a bål.
What happens to the pictures?
Most of them disappear once they have been seen. If someone chooses to keep one, it is saved to the photos on their own phone, and the sender is told, exactly like a screenshot.
What age is Glimt for?
13 and up. You have to give your date of birth when you create an account, and if you are younger the account is never created.
What if the phone is lost?
Pick a password in the app and your glimt come back on a new phone. Do nothing at all, and iCloud Keychain or Google Block Store carries the key over on its own.
What does it cost?
Nothing right now. Some things will later be part of Glimt+, but everyone who joins before launch keeps them for free, permanently.
Join from the start
The iOS beta is open now. If you are on Android, or you would rather wait a bit, put yourself on the list.
Join the iOS beta
Everyone who joins before launch keeps the paid features for free, permanently. I'll send one email when Glimt opens, and nothing else. That I promise.
App Store · coming soon
Google Play · coming soon
