Sanct launches in Malaysia as a free download, and asks every new user to bring five close people first

Sanct, a social app for family and close friends, launched in Malaysia on Wednesday (Sept 30) and is now available as a free download on the Apple App Store. It went live in Indonesia on the same day, two days after Singapore. The app asks new users to first bring in five people who are close to them, and some features stay closed until they do. Sanct supports Bahasa Melayu, English, Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi, carries no ads, and has five thousand people on the platform.

KUALA LUMPUR: Sanct, a social app for family and close friends, launched in Malaysia on Wednesday (Sept 30) and is now available as a free download on the Apple App Store.

The app went live in Indonesia on the same day, two days after its launch in Singapore on Monday (Sept 28). It is now available in all three of its first launch countries.

Sanct supports Bahasa Melayu, English, Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi. It is free to use and carries no advertisements. An Android version on Google Play is not ready yet.

The app starts in an unusual way for a social platform. New users are asked to first bring in five people who are close to them. Until a user has five friends, some features stay closed: friend search, friend suggestions, Memoji and the Verse menu.

Five people first

Sanct founder Sion Abednego said the number was kept small on purpose.

“Think about who you tell first when something good happens, or when your day goes badly. For most people it is a small number. Sanct is made for those people, so it asks for five of them before anything else,” he said in a statement.

He said he expected most Malaysians to start with their own family.

“For many Malaysians, the first five are easy to name: a parent in the home town, a brother or sister working across the Causeway, two or three friends from school. Add them the next time you balik kampung and sit at the same table,” he added.

There are three ways to add a friend: meeting in person and scanning each other’s QR code in the app, using an invite code, or through an introduction from a friend who is already on Sanct.

Once a user has five friends, search and friend suggestions open, and they reach friends of friends. People beyond that cannot be added.

A five-minute guide for new users

For new users, the company has published a five-minute video guide on YouTube. It is presented by Sancty, the small companion inside the app, who shows how to sign up, how to bring in the first five people and what each of the five menus is for.

In the guide, a character named Clarissa adds her people one at a time: her sister, three friends and, as the fifth, her mother at the dinner table at home. The video is in English.

What Malaysians can do from the first day

Users can sign up with an email address and a code sent to it, or with a Google or Apple account. After that they can:

– Share a moment in five ways: a photo or video from the camera, a thought as a note or a poll, a check-in at a place, the music they are listening to, and a good-night check-in before sleeping.

– Choose who sees each moment: all their friends, selected friends, or only themselves.

– Chat with one friend or with the whole family in a group, and call by voice or video.

– Enter the Sanctum, a small beach inside the app that opens at 6pm every day.

Users are also accompanied by Sancty, who can remind them about their routines and plans, such as a meal or a time to rest. These habit reminders are optional and switched off by default.

On user data, the company said Sanct does not sell user data to third parties. Sancty processes data only inside the user’s own account in order to respond, and the data is not used to train public AI models. The privacy policy is available at https://sanctsocial.app/privacy

Pricing and availability

Sanct is a free download. Its core features will stay free, while optional premium features will be introduced later. There are no ads in either.

The app is available for iPhone on the Apple App Store in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. The Google Play version for Android users is not ready yet.

Sanct Social is registered in Singapore (Sanct Social Pte Ltd) and Indonesia (PT Sanct Social Indonesia) and was founded by Sion, who is from Indonesia. Five thousand people are already on the platform. The company has also released a four-episode short film series on YouTube about a family living across a border: 

For more information and to download the app, visit https://sanct.social

This press release has also been published on VRITIMES