Tetracom — Contact groups & Safety Circle

Back to user help index

A group is a name you give to a set of your contacts — for example “Family,” “Climb crew,” or “Work crew.” Once you have a group, you can send to everyone in it with a single tap instead of picking people one at a time. You can send any kind of message to a group: a push-to-talk voice clip, a text, a question with options, or your location.

Your groups are yours. A group lives on your phone — you build it from people you are already connected to, and only you decide who is in it. Tetracom’s servers never see your group or who is in it.

Create a group

Go to the Contacts tab.
Open Groups and tap Create group (the new-group button).
Give the group a name — something you will recognise, like “Family.”
Tick the contacts you want in the group. You can only add people you are already connected to.
Tap Save. The group now appears in your group list, ready to use.

You can edit a group later — rename it, or add and remove members. When you change who is in a group, the people you message next will see the updated group.

Send to a group

Sending to a group is just like sending to one person — you pick the group as your recipient instead of a single contact.

On the Contacts tab, pick the group you want to send to (the same way you would tap a single contact).
Send as usual:
- Voice — on the Talk tab, hold the microphone (or Volume Up) and speak; let go to send.
- Text or a question — tap the Text button and type your message (add options to make it a question).
- Location — use send-my-location.

Everyone in the group gets their own copy of your message. Each person receives it as a normal message from you, and each can reply to you directly — replies come back to you, not to the whole group.

Each copy is end-to-end encrypted just for that one person, exactly like a one-to-one message. There is no shared “group inbox” on a server — Tetracom simply delivers a private copy to each member.

Getting added to a group — the join request

When someone sends a message to a group that includes you, your app learns the group’s name and who else is in it. If the group contains people you are not yet connected to, Tetracom shows you a “Join group?” request.

Approve — you join the group, and Tetracom helps you connect to the members you are missing (see the cascade below).
Decline — nothing happens and nothing is saved. You still received the message that was sent to you; you just do not join the group.

Automatic connecting (the cascade)

To be in a group with people, you need to be connected to them. When you approve a join request, Tetracom does the legwork for you: it automatically sends a normal connection request to each group member you are not already connected to.

Those requests work exactly like any other connection request — the recipient still has to approve you. The only difference is that their app can tell them why: instead of a bare “X wants to connect,” they see something like “X wants to connect — you’re both in group Family.” As each person approves, you become connected, and from then on they receive your group messages too. Bit by bit, everyone in the group ends up connected to everyone else.

Until someone approves your connection request, they simply will not get the group messages you send — nothing is forced. Approving is always up to each person.

Your Safety Circle (SOS Group)

Your Safety Circle — also called your SOS Group — is the one group of trusted people your SOS alerts go to. The easiest way to set it up is the dedicated SOS Group (Safety Circle) section near the top of the Contacts tab: tap Set up, tick the contacts you want, and save. You pick the members directly — no need to make a separate group first.

See Setting up your SOS group for the step-by-step.

You can have only one Safety Circle at a time. Setting up a new SOS group replaces the previous one. (If you prefer, you can still mark any existing group as your circle with its star button in the Groups list — it is the same single circle either way.)

How private is it?

Groups keep the same privacy as one-to-one messages:

Every group message is end-to-end encrypted to each member individually. Tetracom’s servers cannot read your messages.
Your group itself — its name and member list — is never stored on a server. It lives on the phones of the people in it.
The only thing the server is told is, when you approve a join request, that a connection request was made “through a group” (with the group’s name) — just so the other person sees a friendlier prompt. That is it.

Still stuck?

If something here does not match what you see, or you hit a problem this page does not cover, email help@tetracom.me. Please include your phone make and model, your Android version, and the Tetracom app version so we can help faster.

On this page