Bobby lives in the house, not on one phone.
Ridgeback is the app. Bobby is the assistant, named after a particular dog rather than a brand. A Rhodesian Ridgeback is a large wheaten dog bred in southern Africa to work out ahead of people instead of being told what to do at every step, and indoors he picks a doorway with a view of the room and lies across it. He learns his household quickly and treats everyone else as an open question. The software keeps his habits.
One assistant your whole household shares. It knows who each of you is, keeps what you tell it inside your own walls, and answers the same whether you reach it from a phone in the kitchen or from Discord on a laptop.
The working prototype
The thread belongs to the house.
Inside the app, a household conversation is shared. Bobby is not a private session each person opens alone, and everyone in the house sees the same thread in the same order.
Ordering comes from the database rather than from whichever device shouted first, and a device that was asleep catches up from where it left off instead of missing what it slept through.
How you reach it
Every way in is a real way in.
Not one real app and two afterthoughts. The same core answers all three.
iPhone
in progressA native app in Swift and SwiftUI. Text recognition and speech run on the phone, so the fast things stay fast.
Android
in progressA native app in Kotlin and Compose. Parity with iPhone is checked by the build rather than promised in a meeting.
Discord
builtThe original client, and still an equal one. If your household already lives in a Discord server, Bobby is simply there.
One product, two native apps, parity enforced mechanically. The Discord bot came first and was never demoted: it calls the same chat core the apps call, so a feature cannot quietly arrive in one place only. Each way in keeps its own conversation; what they share is the abilities and what Bobby knows about you.
Children
Different capabilities. The same protection.
Most family software gives you an age slider and hopes. Bobby separates what somebody is allowed to do from how carefully it speaks to them.
A ridgeback does not bark at noises. He watches, and you only hear about the thing that matters. Safe mode is that: it takes nothing away from what a child may do, and changes what comes back to them.
Your household defines its own groups over a fixed set of capabilities. Five arrive seeded: Creator, Manager, Member, Guest, Viewer. Rename them to whatever your family actually calls people, because the label is presentation and the identifier underneath never moves.
Safe mode belongs to the person, not to a group they are in. That sounds like a technical detail. It is the whole point: put a child in another group to let them do one more thing and their protection stays exactly where you set it.
Two people, almost nothing in common in what they can do, and exactly the same protection in how Bobby talks to them. Neither had to be made older on paper to get a capability, and neither loses the protection by gaining one.
Your data
What you tell Bobby stays in your house.
Not a promise in a policy document. Three decisions in how it is built.
The ridge a ridgeback is named for is a strip along his spine where the hair grows the other way. These three decisions are the same shape: each one runs against the easier version of itself.
Isolation is forced, not remembered
Every household-scoped table filters by a variable set fresh on each transaction. A query that forgets to say which household it means still cannot reach into another one. The protection does not depend on every future line of code being careful.
Photos never pass through the service
Your app asks for a link and uploads straight to storage. The bytes never travel through Ridgeback. Duplicate detection is scoped to your household, so your upload is never matched against a stranger's file, which would leak that the file exists.
Not open yet
Join the waitlist.
Ridgeback is in private development. Two of the three apps are still being built and several pieces are designed but not written yet.
Leave an address and we will write when a household shaped like yours can join. Telling us who lives with you is the useful part: it decides which households open first.
You are on the list.
Nothing was transmitted. This page is a design prototype with no server behind it, so the address stayed in your browser.
Honestly
Where Ridgeback actually is.
A site that draws planned features the same way it draws shipped ones is how you end up with the wrong idea of what exists.