Published: March 8, 2022
We have now released iPhone and Android apps to Apple AppStore and Google Play Store, APK for Android is also available for direct download.
Please note: the current version is only supported on iPhone 8+ and on Android 10+ - we are planning to add support for iPad and older devices very soon, and we will announce it on our Reddit and Twitter channels - please subscribe to follow our updates there.
We are building a new platform for distributed Internet applications where privacy of the messages and the network matter.
We aim to provide the best possible protection of messages and metadata. Today there is no messaging application that works without global user identities, so we believe we provide better metadata privacy than alternatives. SimpleX is designed to be truly distributed with no central server, and without any global user identities. This allows for high scalability at low cost, and also makes it virtually impossible to snoop on the network graph.
The first application built on the platform is Simplex Chat. The platform can easily support a private social network feed and a multitude of other services, which can be developed by the Simplex team or third party developers.
Further details on platform objectives and technical design are available in SimpleX platform overview.
Evgeny (SimpleX Chat founder): I have been working on this platform for a long time to provide a place where all people can communicate freely with each other, without fear of persecution because of what they said and who they are connected with. Not sharing information about your connections is very important, particularly for people living in oppressive regimes. Because of the terrible conflict between Russia and Ukraine, people of both countries – I have friends and family there – could be at risk when sharing their opinions or just from being connected to people who were prosecuted. Every messenger app that knows who you are can end up sharing all of your connections with undesirable third parties, either as a result of a court order or as a result of attack - so even Signal, which has strong encryption, cannot protect your connection graph. I hope our messenger can help people living in the oppressive regimes to express their opinions without fear and risk of prosecution.
Thanks a lot to everybody who helped testing and improving the apps!
If you have a TestFlight version installed you can continue using it.
We plan to keep it as stable as we can, and it will give you access to all new features 1-2 weeks earlier - it's limited to 10,000 users, so you can grab it while it's available. You can still communicate with people who use a public version – we are committed to maintaining backwards compatibility.
You can always migrate from a public App Store version to a TestFlight version. The opposite migration - from TestFlight to public version - is only possible when we have the same app versions released, as there are usually some database migrations that cannot be reversed. To migrate to public version you have to disable automatic updates on TestFlight, wait until public version catches up and then install it from App Store. In any case, it is safe installing the public version, but it might crash if you have a newer version from TestFlight - in this case you just need to re-install the app from TestFlight and install App Store version a bit later - you would not lose any of your data.
The apps use the same core code as our terminal app, that was used and stabilized over a long time, and it provides the same level of privacy and security that has been available since the release of v1 earlier this year:
You can read more technical details in our recent v1 announcement.
A big thank you to @angerman for making it possible to compile our Haskell code to mobile platforms and getting it approved on app stores - it has been a non-trivial project, and it is still ongoing.
Once you install the app, you can connect to anybody:
Please let us know what else you think is important and if you find any bugs.