Akin family trees, kept in the family

Who was whose uncle, finally written down.

Akin is a family tree that lives on your phone. Walk from person to person, see the whole family at once, and ask it how you are related to anyone in it. Free, and yours: nothing leaves the phone unless you say so.

See what is free How the encryption works

Coming to the App Store. Android after that.

FK IK M A L

What it does

Built for the family member who ends up keeping the tree: the one everyone phones to ask how they are related to somebody at a wedding.

Walk the family

Tap anyone and the tree rearranges around them. Or open the whole-tree view and see everybody at once.

How are we related?

Pick two people and Akin says it in words: your mother's cousin, your half-brother, your grandfather's second wife.

Real families

Two biological parents at most, and separately the people who raised you. Half-siblings, partners with a status and a year, the lot.

Nobody is forgotten

Birth dates can be a year alone when that is all anyone remembers. Those who passed away stay in the tree, gently dimmed.

Bring your tree along

Import a GEDCOM file from MyHeritage, Ancestry or FamilySearch. Free, because your tree should not be held hostage anywhere.

Share the picture

Turn the whole family into one image and send it to the group chat.

Free, and Plus

The tree itself is free and stays free. Plus is for sharing it with your family through the cloud, and for the extras around it. One payment per family: whoever sets the tree up pays, and everyone they invite joins for nothing.

Free

Your whole family, on your own phone.

  • As many people as you like, no cap
  • Walk the family, whole-tree view, search
  • "How are we related?" for anyone
  • Every kind of relation, dates and notes
  • GEDCOM import from other programs
  • Share the tree as an image, with a small Akin mark in the corner
  • Encrypted on the phone, always
  • Stays on this phone: no cloud, no invitations
  • Shows ads

No account needed. Nothing to cancel.

Plus

Everything in Free, and the family joins in.

  • Save the family to the cloud, encrypted on your phone first
  • Invite relatives: viewer, can-add, or admin
  • Everyone's changes sync, on every phone
  • Photos, cropped to a circle, synced too
  • Birthday reminders, timed how you like
  • Moments: birthdays, anniversaries, memorials
  • Backups you own: JSON, GEDCOM export, and one locked with twelve words
  • Face ID lock on the app
  • Shared images without the Akin mark
  • No ads, and email answered by a person

One payment covers the whole family. Invited relatives pay nothing.

Why the cloud part is safe

Sharing a family tree means putting your family's names, dates and photos on somebody else's computer. So here is exactly what happens when you do, in the order it happens.

  1. Your phone makes a key. Not us. It never leaves the phone, and we never see it.
  2. You write down twelve words. They are the only way to get the key back if you lose the phone. We do not have them, cannot reset them, and cannot help you guess them. That is the point.
  3. Everything is locked before it leaves. Each person in your tree is encrypted on the phone, then uploaded. What lands on our server is a blob with no name, no date and no photo we can read: only its size and when it changed.
  4. Inviting someone hands them the key, not us. The key is wrapped for their phone specifically. Before you let them in, both screens show the same nine-digit code. You read it out loud to each other. If the codes differ, someone is in the middle, and Akin refuses.
  5. Removing someone really removes them. Their key is deleted, and Akin then offers to re-lock the whole family with a new one, so even the copy already on their phone goes stale.

Said plainly: we host ciphertext. We cannot read your family tree, we cannot hand it to anyone who asks us, and we cannot email it back to you if you lose your words. Anybody who tells you they can do all three is not encrypting anything.