Stereo

Stereo describes itself as the social app for viral voice notes, spontaneous conversations and finding your community, and its front page is unusual among these platforms in being readable without an account: posts, suggested accounts and trending hashtags all render to a visitor. Behind that sits a voice-first product — live talks anyone can join by link, short voice posts, direct messages and party games. The operator is a UK company, Stereo App Limited, named once in the terms and nowhere on the about page, which carries no company information, no team, no founding date and no history. That absence is the first thing worth knowing, because the product has changed hands and changed shape more than once and its own pages say nothing about any of it.

You start a talk by choosing a topic, optionally attaching a link or a poll, agreeing to the guidelines and either adding co-hosts yourself or waiting for the app to suggest someone. Listeners join from a link the host shares, which can carry a short clip as a preview, and past talks stay in a tab where they can be replayed or downloaded as audio files. The detail that sets the mechanics apart from every other platform here is how a listener becomes a speaker: the invitation arrives as a phone call, so answering the phone puts you on air. Registration needs a phone number for verification, posts are capped at 2 minutes and replies at 15 seconds, and the games built on top need at least 4 participants.

Nothing on the site carries a price. What exists is an internal currency called stars, which the terms say is bought in the app and spent to unlock features, is non-refundable under any circumstance the terms allow, and is forfeited if the account is closed. Subscriptions exist alongside it, renew automatically, and are not cancelled by deleting the app, and the terms state that the price of stars is shown in the app at the time of purchase, which is where a reader must go to find out what anything costs. One dated notice still stands on the site: a statement from August 2023 saying purchases would stop renewing automatically from the middle of that month, which is either an announcement nobody removed or the current state of affairs, and the pages do not settle which.

The floor is 13, stated in both the terms and the privacy policy, with under-18s treated as young users who need parental consent and receive stricter privacy defaults, and purchases reserved for adults. Moderation is discretionary in the terms' own words, which reserve the right without any obligation to review content and to delete, move or edit it without notice and for any reason or none. The help pages supply the practical version: report from a talk, a post or a profile, block a user, and expect that retaliating can also cost an account. Retention is the section to read closely, because deletion is not what the word suggests. Removing an account leaves conversations with other active users in place, backups can persist for up to 30 days, the phone number held by the verification vendor is kept for up to 90 days, and reports about a user are retained for 6 years after the account is gone. What the policy says it collects is broad even for a voice product, taking in audio streams and recordings alongside a name, date of birth, gender, a photograph, a phone number, device identifiers, contacts, location derived from Wi-Fi or coordinates, and payment details. Its list of who receives that data — technology vendors, anti-fraud services, moderators, law enforcement, other companies in the group, advertising partners and Google Analytics — sits beside a help page promising that personally identifiable information is never shared, a sentence that holds only if the reader accepts a narrow reading of identifying.

People who would rather talk than type and who accept that the conversation is public by default: a talk anyone with a link can join, a voice post anyone can hear, a game that needs four people to start. The phone-number requirement makes it heavier than an anonymous chat app and lighter than a social network, and the 13-year floor means it was never an adults-only space even though the mechanics assume a certain confidence about speaking to strangers. Anyone expecting deletion to remove their conversations will find the retention rules read otherwise.

A live product behind a shell that has stopped being maintained, and a review has to describe both. Everything still works — talks, posts, games, both store listings, every route on the site — while the terms have not been touched since 2023, the privacy policy since a month before that, a subscription wind-down notice from the same year is still on the page, and the newest item in the public feed is months old. None of that is offered here as a claim about the company's health, because its pages say nothing about ownership, history or scale: the operator is a UK company named once in the terms, and the about page is a splash with no facts in it. What the paperwork does show is worth reading before speaking into it — an audio product that records audio streams, keeps reports against a user for 6 years, and leaves conversations behind when an account is deleted.