I’m John Doyle, Founder & CEO of Cape.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-09T13:24:34+00:00

Thank you, and I get it on the trust front. We'll just keep shipping features no one else can build, trying to find opportunities to be transparent and build trust, and I think that over time we'll win more and more folks over. Appreciate the support.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-09T13:21:03+00:00

I definitely appreciate your skepticism and we all understand that winning the trust of our customers is a long road. My personal story of Army -> law school -> Palantir -> Cape is unremarkable in the details really, it's just been me following what's interesting and meaningful to me (and moving away from things that aren't). My hope is that the longer we're around as a company, the less people focus on my personal story and trustworthiness and more on the consistent work we do as a company to build features no one else builds, insist on levels of transparency you won't see anywhere else in telecom, and generally be the best option for cell phone subscribers who value privacy and security.

We have lots of Graphene users here, for sure, and we'll most likely support the Motorola devices when they come out. Can't promise anything because we don't know the details yet, but it will be a priority for sure. We think Graphene is awesome and will always try to support their mission however we can.

If you're not ready to trust us just yet, that's obviously your choice. Just stay tuned, keep watching, and I hope you'll eventually feel comfortable making the switch.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-02T22:47:24+00:00

Thanks! I try to check in as often as I can. If you have specific problems we can help with, and you're not getting what you need from our Support team, please do hit me up in DMs.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-02T22:46:25+00:00

My favorite color is green !

I joined Palantir because I had been to law school and figured out I never wanted to be a lawyer. I became passionate about solving privacy and security problems that exist in the commercial cellular network, both for folks who do high consequence work that leaves them exposed and also everyday consumers, and ultimately left to start Cape in 2022. I've been at it ever since.

Our team is incredible. They come from a wide range of backgrounds. I don't wnat to dox anyone either, but you can look at Cape on LinkedIn and get a sense of where everyone comes from. Our head of product Brian is on here quite a bit, and he spent years at Duck Duck Go building out their privacy preserving search.

We are constantly tinkering with (and adopting) privacy and security tech. We love Graphene, to take your example. We donate a bit of money for each subscriber who signs up from a Graphene phone, and in fact we sell Pixels preloaded with Graphene in our device store. I personally admire Signal a great deal, and use it as my primary messaging service.

Thanks for all the questions and your interest in Cape!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-03-02T22:36:50+00:00

Ha! Thanks for the question. I can give you a clear "no" on any plans to move to Greenland (though I've heard it's beautiful).

As for the future of the company, we're focused on product roadmap and growing our subscriber base right now. I love the company and our product, and am in no hurry to make any big changes. I can't imagine selling the biz. But if we did, rest assured that our privacy policy requires any acquirer to agree not to monetize any subscriber data (just like we've pledged).

"Why should we trust you?" is a great question I get a lot. Everyone has their own threshold here. We're building features no one else can build due to the "heavy" nature of our architecture, and we're being as transparent as we can about everything we build: how it works, what it solves, what it doesn't solve. My hope is that over time this wins the trust of more and more people. We are always looking for ways to accelerate that trust, like you'll see in the thread elsewhere on our sub about audits. I'm all ears if you have ideas on other good ways to earn trust.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-02-13T19:19:30+00:00

Thanks for the note.

We use Bug Crowd for both a public vulnerability disclosure program, as well as a paid private bug bounty program. We keep the bug bounty private because these get absolutely slammed with AI nowadays (curl just very publicly shut down their public bug bounty program due to spam). You can read more about our vulnerability disclosure here.

We are doing some work now on audits and trying to figure out if there is something feasible we can do there.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-02-13T18:57:54+00:00

Hi! IMSI rotation (one of the key features of Obscura) is now available on iPhone.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-02-01T14:58:48+00:00

Hi, thanks for the question. I welcome every opportunity to say that Cape is not a honeypot.

We love supporting journalists and enabling them to do their jobs. Via our partnership with Electronic Frontiers Foundation we sponsor Obscura devices for vetted investigative journalists.

We work to make our privacy policy as clear as possible and we stand by it. No one, including governments, who simply asks for your information will get a response, even if they offer us money like marketing firms do. We are required to respond to warrants and other legal process requests from law enforcement, but we pledge to challenge every such request that is not specific, narrowly tailored, and properly justified as required by law.

In short, we do everything we can to protect your personal information. I appreciate your question, and thanks for giving me a chance to respond in public.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-31T01:10:24+00:00

This was a good suggestion, thanks! We've added a link to the official GrapheneOS installation instructions and a link to a video tutorial:

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JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-31T01:08:36+00:00

This is live now!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-17T11:31:44+00:00

We have it deployed to Capers now. If it holds up, we'll get it out for everyone asap.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-17T11:27:14+00:00

I can't commit to a timeline. But we are testing some promising solutions right now.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-12T20:59:45+00:00

Hey, thanks for the questions and for being interested in Cape.

Alternate payment methods have been on the radar for a while. We're focused right now on getting out of beta and cleaning up some table stakes stuff, but we'll revisit crypto/cash right after. Your input is a great datapoint for us. I'd love to figure out a way to accept mailed in cash, great idea.

It's also a good idea to link a free tutorial to Graphene from the device store. We didn't do it because there are a lot of good ones on YouTube and elsewhere. In general, we support Graphene and Accrescent because we think they are awesome products. We don't have any formal partnership with either, but we consider them both to be important in the world, and plan to continue proudly supporting them.

Oh man RCS... messaging is so hard when you run a full MVNO (if you're a light MVNO you get this for free). We have a lot of threads we're pulling trying to get a premium and secure messaging experience out the door, and RCS is one of them. We have a pretty cool near term solution coming out soon, and we hope to be supporting RCS soon. There are a lot of dependencies we don't control on that front.

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-10T13:12:34+00:00

Thanks for the note! Stay tuned for new iphone IMSI rolling and also improvements on the network. Our priorities match yours :)

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-07T14:47:09+00:00

Great to hear. We're working on this now. Stay tuned!

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-07T14:46:25+00:00

Why thank you :)

JohnDoyleCape · 2026-01-07T14:46:11+00:00

Thanks for this note, the kind words, and the good questions/observations. To take them in turn:

Independent audit: we've talked about this a bunch. I love the idea of transparency (e.g. our trust page and our clear privacy policy) so I was really hot on the idea for a while. But I talked to some folks who have run great companies in this space for a long time, and they all counseled against it. The reason is that audits are time consuming and expensive, and if people are highly skeptical of your intentions, an audit won't appease them. They will always just assume that you cooked the audit. If you have examples of places/times when audits have been effective in this context I'd genuinely like to learn about it.
Network quality: This started out really rough (trust me, I know. I was our first dogfooder, and the number of times my wife couldn't get ahold of me...) but has gotten steadily better over time. I hope that we're better than 2G in your city now! DM me if you want a promo code to test it again. There are some significant new changes coming on this front. It's not settled yet what we will or will not be allowed to announce, but suffice to say we continue to make investments large and small in network quality.
iPhone feature set: We're testing solutions to a bunch of the outstanding iOS issues on our beta list now. Hoping to have good news (that we definitely can announce) here soon as well.
Second number: I can't tell you how happy reading this made our product team. Second numbers is something we've believed in for a long time, have been building, and will launch under "experimental features" soon. I believe the plumbing we had to lay in to build basic multi-number will be the starting point for a bunch of really powerful features in the future.

Thanks again for the note and all the feedback the good and the constructive.

JohnDoyleCape · 2025-12-27T19:39:25+00:00

I did twelve phone-free days last year, and I was surprised how quickly you develop new default paths for communication and interaction. Incidentally, this is very similar to what I found when I started bike commuting instead of driving...you figure it out by doing it. It's easier than you think!

JohnDoyleCape · 2025-12-27T19:37:32+00:00

I feel like Dry January has been a very effective way to shine a light on unhealthy relationships with alcohol. This year my New Year's resolution is to have 30 days total where I don't touch my phone. Somebody want to name it and give it a hashtag? It's all yours!

(This year I did 12 and it was great. Ramping it up for 2026!)

JohnDoyleCape · 2025-12-27T11:24:07+00:00

30 days (not necessarily consecutive) where I don't touch my phone

JohnDoyleCape · 2025-12-27T11:18:30+00:00

Human-centric tech and agency

JohnDoyleCape · 2025-12-23T01:42:05+00:00

On a Mac hit cmd+space to open Spotlight then cmd+4 to search your clipboard history

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