01Why Iraq needed its own
Forty-odd million people, most of them under thirty, running their entire social life through messengers designed somewhere else — for fast networks, for Latin scripts, for advertising. Iraqi Arabic was an afterthought. Weak signal was an edge case. Voice notes, the way half the country actually talks, were bolted on.
We wanted the opposite: an app where the mic is the biggest button, where a message written in a Baghdad basement with one bar of 3G still lands, where names sort correctly in Arabic, and where nobody’s business model depends on reading your chats.
02What we believe
- Voice is not a feature. It is how people here tell the story properly — with the laugh and the pause left in.
- The network is what it is. Design for the signal people actually have, not the one in the demo.
- Private by default, not by setting. End-to-end encryption everywhere, no ads, no trackers, and no data for sale — because a messenger that pays its bills with your conversations will always end up reading them.
- Made in Iraqi Arabic first. Then translated to English, not the other way round.
03Who we are
Ashlonk is built by a small team of engineers and designers in Baghdad. Some of us have shipped products abroad and came back; some never left. We work openly with security researchers, publish a transparency report, and write our policies to Iraqi law — because this is where we live.
We are not funded by advertising and never will be. The service is free today; if we ever charge for anything, it will be for optional extras, announced openly, and never for the basics of talking to your people.
04Where we are going
Launch on Google Play and the App Store. Then: better calls on 2G, community groups for neighbourhoods and campuses, a desktop companion, and whatever you tell us you need. Follow the blog for the honest version of progress.
05Talk to us
Users: support@ashlonk.com. Press and partners: press@ashlonk.com. Everything else: hello@ashlonk.com. We reply in Arabic or English — whichever you write in.