Beacon BabyFor both of you
“Did she eat? How much? When?”
Three questions that are not really questions. They are a shift handover conducted by a person who has slept four hours, to a person who has slept three, about events neither of them can fully remember.
The real problem
The day only exists in one person's head.
Whoever did the last three feeds is the database. Everyone else has to query them, out loud, usually at the exact moment they are handing over a baby and trying to leave the house.
It goes wrong in a specific way. The question “did you feed her?” is neutral in intent and never neutral in the room. It arrives sounding like an audit, and the honest answer — “I think so? Around one?” — sounds like a confession. Two exhausted people end up negotiating over a fact that simply was not written down.
The fix is not a better memory or a better attitude. It is taking the person out of the middle.
BEACON BABY
Hello
Last activities
Quick log
One tap to logShared activity
View allBefore she arrives
Decide who keeps track before you need to.
The easiest time to settle this is before anyone has a baby in their arms. Ten minutes one evening covers it: the log lives on both phones, you agree who covers which night, and you decide who else gets an invite — a grandparent, a nanny, the friend doing Tuesdays.
Then one of you sets up sharing on the Family tab and invites the other. When the first night comes, nobody is the memory: whoever is awake taps once, and the other phone already has it.
Share with your family
Every phone. One log. Nobody asking anybody anything.
Set up sharing from the Family tab and everyone you invite sees the same feeds, changes and sleeps as they happen, with each entry saying who logged it. The handoff stops being a conversation and becomes a screen you all already have.
- 01
One of you sets it up
Sign in with Apple — where you can choose Hide My Email so we never see your real address — or with an email that carries a link and an 8-digit code. Signing in is what switches sharing on; until you do, nothing about you or your baby leaves your phone.
- 02
You invite someone with a six-character code
Choose what they can do — manage the family, log care, or only view — and which children they see. They enter the code on their phone and join, bringing their own entries with them, a move that cannot be undone. A code works once and ends in 24 hours, and making a new one ends any unused earlier one.
- 03
Every phone stays live
New entries appear on the other phones as they happen, not on next open, marked with who logged them and who edited them. Anyone who can log care logs; nobody has to relay.
Sharing is free — it is not part of Plus — for as many people as you invite. The Account and sync screen, under Family, shows which state you are in, in as many words: “Off. Nothing leaves this device.” or “Live. Changes appear as they happen.”
What turning it on means
Six things worth knowing before you do.
Sharing moves your log off your phone. That is a real change, and it should be a considered one — so here is the whole of it.
It is off until you turn it on
On an install that never switches it on, nothing has changed: no account, no email address, and nothing on any server of ours.
Your household is isolated by the database
Every row is keyed to a household, and the database refuses any request for a household you are not a member of. That is enforced underneath the app rather than by the app asking nicely.
Photos never sync
They stay on the device that took them, with file protection on, excluded from backups. Sharing moves the log, not the album.
Anyone can leave, and the log stays
Leave a family whenever you like and you land back in a family of your own; the log stays on your phone and on theirs, and new entries simply stop being shared. Anyone who can manage the family can remove someone, and what that person logged stays in the history. Nobody can remove the person who started the family, and a family always keeps at least one person who can manage it.
Every child, under the right name
Children sync between phones, so a feed logged for one child on one phone arrives under that child on every other. You choose which children each person can see.
Deleting is in the app, and immediate
Delete my account, under Family → Account and sync, removes your account there and then. If you are the last one in the household, the log on the server goes with it; if others are still in it, the shared log stays with them. Your own copy stays on your phone either way.
Treat an invite code like a password. It works once and expires within a day, but anyone holding a live one can join your household and read your log.
If you would rather not
One phone still works, and always will.
Plenty of households run the whole first year on the phone that lives on the arm of the nursing chair. Hand it over and the last feed, change and sleep are at the top of Today, with the time since each one on its button — or send a care summary instead. That was the design before sharing existed and it did not get worse when sharing arrived.
Sharing is off until you turn it on, and on an install that never does, nothing about you or your baby is on any server of ours.
Stop asking each other. Read the same screen.
Sharing takes about a minute to set up, costs nothing, and removes one recurring argument from your week.
Free to log, forever. No account needed to log. iPhone, iOS 26 or later.
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