Riverkin
Riverkin draws your family as a river: everyone stands at the year they were born, and the lines run from parents to children. It works entirely on your own phone.
Anything at all — a question, something that looks wrong, a relationship the app has worked out badly, or a word that reads oddly in Dutch.
It helps to say which phone you are on, whether the app is in English or Dutch, and what you were doing at the time. Please do not send us your family file unless we ask — we would rather not have it.
Tap the file wherever it arrived — Messages, Mail, AirDrop, Files — and choose Riverkin. The app shows you what is in it before anything is added, and you decide whether to open it.
No. Riverkin matches people up by name and date of birth, adds the ones you were missing and fills in the dates you did not have. Where your copy and theirs disagree about something, it asks you which is right instead of deciding for you.
Two ways. Share the file — it goes by AirDrop, mail, message, or into Files like any other document. Or, if you are sitting together, show the codes on your screen and let the other phone read them with its camera. Nothing goes over the internet either way.
Share the file to yourself — mail it, or drop it in Files or iCloud Drive — and open it on the new phone. Do this now and then anyway: a family that exists only inside one app on one phone is one lost phone away from gone.
Because that is clearer than “twice removed”. First cousins share a grandparent; the generations tell you how far apart the two of you stand, and which way. Set who you are in Settings and every person carries their tie to you.
Riverkin works every tie out from the parents, so a wrong answer nearly always means a wrong parent, a missing marriage, or two people who ought to be one. Open “How we are related” to see the path it walked — the mistake is usually visible on it. Saying whether someone is a woman or a man also lets it say niece rather than niece or nephew.
Yes. Keep them as two families and switch between them in the river. Each one has its own first generation and its own idea of who you are.
Settings → Privacy → Lock the app. It then asks for Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode, and covers itself when you switch apps so the family is not sitting in the app switcher.
Never. There is no account and no server. The app works the same in aeroplane mode as it does at home.
English and Dutch, throughout — including the words for relatives that the two languages do not divide up the same way. It follows your phone the first time and can be changed in Settings.
The same app runs on iPad, and the river has a great deal more room there.
In force from 11 August 2026 · Riverkin 1.0
Riverkin collects nothing. There is no account to make, no server to send anything to, and the app makes no network requests at all — not for analytics, not for crash reports, not for anything.
Everything you type — names, dates, relationships, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, addresses, godparents, notes of who has died — is written into Riverkin's own storage on your device and stays there. It is not readable by other apps. We never see it, because there is nowhere for it to reach us.
Deleting the app deletes all of it. There is no copy anywhere else, so keep a family file somewhere safe if you would mind losing it.
A family leaves your device in exactly two ways, both of which you start:
When you tap someone's telephone number, e-mail address or home address, Riverkin hands it to iOS, which opens the Phone, Messages, Mail or Maps app. What happens after that belongs to those apps and to Apple. Riverkin itself does not dial, send or look anything up.
Riverkin's storage sits inside the app's own container, which means it is included in whatever backup you already make of your iPhone — iCloud or a computer. Those backups are Apple's, made under your own account and its protections, and they are the one place your family exists outside the app. If you would rather it were not there, you can exclude Riverkin from iCloud backup in Settings.
Riverkin contains no advertising, no analytics, no trackers and no third-party software development kits. Nothing about you is sold, shared or profiled, because nothing about you is gathered in the first place. In App Store terms, the app's data collection is Data Not Collected.
A family tree tends to be full of children, and the app is rated 4+. The same thing is true of their details as everyone else's: they are held on the device of the person who typed them, and nothing is collected from anyone.
If a later version of Riverkin ever does something this page does not describe, this page will be rewritten before that version is released, and the date at the top will say so.
Questions about any of this: you@example.com