Kinlore: Family Story Keeper

Francis Irele

About this app

Kinlore is a private book of your family's voices.

You ask the question. Someone who knows the answer says it out loud. It stays on that phone, in their own voice, for as long as the phone lasts.

HOW IT WORKS
1. Add a person — your mother, your grandfather, the neighbour who remembers everything.
2. Choose a question from the book, or write your own.
3. Hold the record button and let them talk. Or type what they say, if they would rather.
4. Keep it. That is the whole app.

EIGHTY QUESTIONS, TEN THEMES
Childhood, Family, Work, Love, Places, Food, Hard times, Objects, Holidays, Advice — eight questions each, and every one of them open from the first minute. Some are easy:

"What is the meal you would ask for if you were coming home?"
"Tell me about a game you played in the street that children do not play any more."

and some are not:

"What is the hardest year you have lived through, and how did you get to the end of it?"
"Is there something in your home that belonged to someone who has died?"

The Numbers screen shows which themes are still empty. Those are the conversations you have not had yet.

THEIR VOICE, NOT A TRANSCRIPT
A recording is kept as a recording. Years later you can hear how they said it, which is the part a transcript loses. If someone would rather write than talk, typing is always there, and nothing in the app pushes you towards the microphone.

A POSTER OF THE YEAR
Kinlore draws a single page — 1080 × 1350, ready to print at A4 or send to a group chat — with the questions answered and the voices on them. Everyone's first poster is free.

AN EXPORT THAT LEAVES NOTHING BEHIND
One file with every word in the book: the questions, the answers, the people, the dates. Recordings stay on the device, because a file holding a year of voices is a file nobody can send. Uninstalling takes everything with it, and there is no copy anywhere else for anyone to find.

PRIVATE IN THE ONLY WAY THAT MEANS ANYTHING
No account. No sign-up. No analytics. No advertising. No tracking. The app is built without the internet permission, so it cannot send a recording anywhere even if it wanted to. That is not a policy we are choosing to follow, it is what the software does. The one permission it asks for is the microphone, and only while a recording is actually running.

EIGHT LANGUAGES
English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese.

THIS VERSION
The book holds one storyteller and every story you record with them, playable and exportable for good. This version takes no payment of any kind and there is no way to buy anything inside it. It mentions a paid tier, Kinlore Pro — a family of voices, and a poster for every one of them — which is not on sale here. Nothing already in the book is ever taken away.

Kinlore is made by Loadcircle Ltd. Runs on Android 8.0 and newer.