What PingCrood is
PingCrood is a messenger first. Your chats, your groups, your calls and your friends' 24-hour stories live in five tabs — Chats, Friends, Calls, Status and You — and they work the way a good messenger should: instantly, with replies, reactions, voice notes, photos, files and a search that takes you straight back to the moment.
What makes PingCrood different is the card at the top of the Chats tab. Random Match is a short video chat with someone you've never met — one tap, one person at a time, with filters for who you'd like to meet, a Safety button that's always in reach, and a friend request when it clicks. Meeting someone new stops being a separate app and becomes something you can do from the same place you talk to everyone else.
- 5tabs: Chats, Friends, Calls, Status, You
- 24hstories that disappear on their own
- 18+adults only, checked by birthday
- 0ads, trackers or things to buy
How we think about it
Conversation first
There's no feed to scroll and no score to chase. The product is the conversation — with the people you already know and, when you feel like it, with someone new.
You decide who sees you
Your profile photo and your status are visible to your contacts by default, not to everyone. Last seen, about, who can add you to groups and who can call you are each a setting — Everyone, My contacts or Nobody — and read receipts can be switched off. In Random Match you choose whether your age, gender and city are shown.
Meeting someone new should feel safe
Your camera stays off until you press Start. You see who you're talking to before you decide to stay. Next person needs no reason. Report and block are one tap away, blocks are permanent in both directions, and PingCrood is for adults only.
Free, with nothing in the way
PingCrood is free to download and use. There are no ads, no coins, no boosts, and no analytics or tracking SDKs in the app, the web client or this site. The privacy policy says exactly what's stored and for how long.
How PingCrood is built
PingCrood is built as one system, end to end. For the curious:
- Android appFlutter and Dart, with the Organic design system — the same tokens you see on this page.
- APINestJS (TypeScript) on PostgreSQL and Redis; messages, presence and matching travel over Socket.IO.
- CallsWebRTC, encrypted in transit, with PingCrood's own TURN relay (coturn) so calls connect on any network.
- PushFirebase Cloud Messaging wakes the phone for messages and rings incoming calls even when the app is closed.
- PingCrood Web & adminNext.js. The web client signs in only by linking from your phone; the admin panel is where reports are reviewed.
- OperationsDocker behind nginx on Oracle Cloud, one deploy script, and automated tests on both the server and the app.
Who makes it
PingCrood is designed, built and run by Fawad Iqbal, an independent software engineer. It's a small operation on purpose: every screen, every API and every line of these pages was made with the same care, and the person who reads contact@fawadiqbal.dev is the person who can fix things.
What's next
PingCrood is on Android today, with an iPhone version on the way. If there's something you'd love it to do — or something that got in your way — tell us. The best ideas so far came from people using it.
Come say hello.
Free on Android, with PingCrood Web for your computer.