I've been attempting to build something similar and every time I take an honest look at the state of affairs on mobile phones I'm end up leaning towards running the way meshtastic users do: either strictly on dedicated hardware, or over a bluetooth link from my phone to dedicated hardware which I'll keep in my backpack or glovebox.
pogue
Sounds like it's basically dead. The issue with messenger apps is that they're a dime a dozen, there are so many of them and they offer so much variability in security, privacy, but most importantly usability and uptime. If your friends won't switch to them, there's almost no point in having them or using them.
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nubinetwork
> unreliable background operation on android
Pretty much every app I have has delayed notifications, and no matter of battery optimization settings can fix it.
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imhoguy
Briar will thrive once EU Chat Control 2.0 passes, P2P E2E encryption is the only way to bypass bullshit laws.
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nyolfen
at least two of its funders were usaid-backed (internews, access now), wonder if that has anything to do with it
grommz
CIA funding dried up. Briar had already started development when Starlink wasn't even a concept. Nowadays every CIA goat herder has their own Starlink terminal.
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Karrot_Kream
Anything that tries to read a "mailbox" on a smartphone is bound to run into difficulties. Smartphones manage to keep battery life high by keeping the modem inactive most of the time. The way to implement any mailbox functionality, i.e. an incoming message that needs attention, is usually done through a centralized push notification endpoint socket. Rather than wasting battery life polling multiple sockets, the OS listens to a single endpoint and farms out pushes that way. Of course to tune this precisely for battery life and for centralization of the platform, both Apple and Android have their own push notification services. Rooted or 3rd party smartphones can change the push notification service.
Any service like Briar that wants to sit atop base smartphones will need to deal with this tension. A fallback is to poll intermittently for new messages, which when tuned correctly can indeed be fairly battery life forward. Of course then your messaging experience is lower bounded by your refresh interval. Modern smartphone OSes also will ruthlessly cut long-running connections in the face of power-save events on device.
In general I think an external radio that you connect your smartphone to via Bluetooth, like Meshcore or Meshtastic, is a better experience overall than simply using a smartphone. Dedicated radios keep smartphone batteries topped up, and having the option to setup an antenna means that if you happen to be in an area where permanent radio setup is plausible, you can lean on good site characteristics, antennas, and filters. It’s hard for a government to ban radios altogether and ISM-ish band devices have a variety of uses in pretty much any developing or developed country (often used in small things like meters or monitors.) And for folks who just some off-grid data capabilities, this approach offers high flexibility without the burden of licensing.
For folks considering going into this, I suggest joining Meshtastic or Amateur Radio communities. I find the further you get from amateur radio or networking communities (mesh* communities have a mix of folks and some can have pretty poor understanding of how radios work), the more the information becomes unreliable and more suffuse with political/social goals than matters like understanding signal propagation or congestion. If you’re in a developed country, Amazon likely has all you need to get started with the Mesh* world of LoRa UHF radios.
davexunit
I sympathize with the developers. Mobile OS push notifications are a big impediment to the adoption of p2p technology and it's hard to do anything novel in the chat space because there's a million chat apps.
vmg12
> We considered completely rebuilding the application from the ground up, or even splitting it into separate applications for online and offline use
This is actually non-trivial. There's an app I was working on where I wanted to have a local first mode that allowed people to use the app for free without an account and there was also a cloud hosted version that allowed for team collaboration, etc.
For this kind of thing to work chunks of the app essentially need to be written twice. So, not fun.
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HelloUsername
That's too bad. Anyone know of a fork or similar project? Maybe Meshtastic/MeshCore/BitChat. Berty Messenger's last update on iOS was in January 2025.
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unethical_ban
It's really sad that both Apple and Google make it so difficult for background processes to run with user consent. The app wasn't even available for iOS because they don't allow apps to listen for messages outside the walled garden's polling service.
Briar is a messenger app that worked on local networks, over Bluetooth, and over Tor if traveling the Internet. Fully encrypted and the purpose was decentralized, serverless messaging.
I liked the concept, and tested it out a little on my Android devices. But it looked straight out of 2009, and it had the issues described in the post. Still. Thanks for the work. I hope it can get revived or inspire others some day.
P.S. feature request! If Alice, Bob and Charlie are all contacts with each other, and Alice writes an offline message to Charlie, Alice should be able to opportunisticly hand the encrypted message to Bob on their shared network, and Bob can deliver it to Charlie.
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rvz
This is what happens when no-one pays for their tools and I expect this to happen when more software becomes AI assisted.
The truth is donations do not work for tiny open source projects in the long term and even when Briar was quietly building for many years, it is clear that it is not enough.
> Last year, we decided that we wouldn’t realistically be able to solve these issues and so we reluctantly decided to shut down the project.
If these are actually the problems, then why not throw 200 dollars of GPT 5.6 at these instead of shutting it down? Were these systematic problems (Apple/Google hegemony, for example) that couldn't be beat with code?
I've been attempting to build something similar and every time I take an honest look at the state of affairs on mobile phones I'm end up leaning towards running the way meshtastic users do: either strictly on dedicated hardware, or over a bluetooth link from my phone to dedicated hardware which I'll keep in my backpack or glovebox.
Sounds like it's basically dead. The issue with messenger apps is that they're a dime a dozen, there are so many of them and they offer so much variability in security, privacy, but most importantly usability and uptime. If your friends won't switch to them, there's almost no point in having them or using them.
> unreliable background operation on android
Pretty much every app I have has delayed notifications, and no matter of battery optimization settings can fix it.
Briar will thrive once EU Chat Control 2.0 passes, P2P E2E encryption is the only way to bypass bullshit laws.
at least two of its funders were usaid-backed (internews, access now), wonder if that has anything to do with it
CIA funding dried up. Briar had already started development when Starlink wasn't even a concept. Nowadays every CIA goat herder has their own Starlink terminal.
Anything that tries to read a "mailbox" on a smartphone is bound to run into difficulties. Smartphones manage to keep battery life high by keeping the modem inactive most of the time. The way to implement any mailbox functionality, i.e. an incoming message that needs attention, is usually done through a centralized push notification endpoint socket. Rather than wasting battery life polling multiple sockets, the OS listens to a single endpoint and farms out pushes that way. Of course to tune this precisely for battery life and for centralization of the platform, both Apple and Android have their own push notification services. Rooted or 3rd party smartphones can change the push notification service.
Any service like Briar that wants to sit atop base smartphones will need to deal with this tension. A fallback is to poll intermittently for new messages, which when tuned correctly can indeed be fairly battery life forward. Of course then your messaging experience is lower bounded by your refresh interval. Modern smartphone OSes also will ruthlessly cut long-running connections in the face of power-save events on device.
In general I think an external radio that you connect your smartphone to via Bluetooth, like Meshcore or Meshtastic, is a better experience overall than simply using a smartphone. Dedicated radios keep smartphone batteries topped up, and having the option to setup an antenna means that if you happen to be in an area where permanent radio setup is plausible, you can lean on good site characteristics, antennas, and filters. It’s hard for a government to ban radios altogether and ISM-ish band devices have a variety of uses in pretty much any developing or developed country (often used in small things like meters or monitors.) And for folks who just some off-grid data capabilities, this approach offers high flexibility without the burden of licensing.
For folks considering going into this, I suggest joining Meshtastic or Amateur Radio communities. I find the further you get from amateur radio or networking communities (mesh* communities have a mix of folks and some can have pretty poor understanding of how radios work), the more the information becomes unreliable and more suffuse with political/social goals than matters like understanding signal propagation or congestion. If you’re in a developed country, Amazon likely has all you need to get started with the Mesh* world of LoRa UHF radios.
I sympathize with the developers. Mobile OS push notifications are a big impediment to the adoption of p2p technology and it's hard to do anything novel in the chat space because there's a million chat apps.
> We considered completely rebuilding the application from the ground up, or even splitting it into separate applications for online and offline use
This is actually non-trivial. There's an app I was working on where I wanted to have a local first mode that allowed people to use the app for free without an account and there was also a cloud hosted version that allowed for team collaboration, etc.
For this kind of thing to work chunks of the app essentially need to be written twice. So, not fun.
That's too bad. Anyone know of a fork or similar project? Maybe Meshtastic/MeshCore/BitChat. Berty Messenger's last update on iOS was in January 2025.
It's really sad that both Apple and Google make it so difficult for background processes to run with user consent. The app wasn't even available for iOS because they don't allow apps to listen for messages outside the walled garden's polling service.
Briar is a messenger app that worked on local networks, over Bluetooth, and over Tor if traveling the Internet. Fully encrypted and the purpose was decentralized, serverless messaging.
I liked the concept, and tested it out a little on my Android devices. But it looked straight out of 2009, and it had the issues described in the post. Still. Thanks for the work. I hope it can get revived or inspire others some day.
P.S. feature request! If Alice, Bob and Charlie are all contacts with each other, and Alice writes an offline message to Charlie, Alice should be able to opportunisticly hand the encrypted message to Bob on their shared network, and Bob can deliver it to Charlie.
This is what happens when no-one pays for their tools and I expect this to happen when more software becomes AI assisted.
The truth is donations do not work for tiny open source projects in the long term and even when Briar was quietly building for many years, it is clear that it is not enough.
TIL Briar is text-only, per https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm
> Last year, we decided that we wouldn’t realistically be able to solve these issues and so we reluctantly decided to shut down the project.
If these are actually the problems, then why not throw 200 dollars of GPT 5.6 at these instead of shutting it down? Were these systematic problems (Apple/Google hegemony, for example) that couldn't be beat with code?