Briar is in maintenance mode

https://briarproject.org/news/2026-maintenance-mode/

by ristello • 7 days ago

171 107 7 days ago

pogue• 7 days ago

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.

embedding-shape• 7 days ago

For most IMs I agree, Briar is/was slightly different though, being P2P and E2E encrypted. There isn't many IMs out there supporting Bluetooth connections between users for example.

raybb• 7 days ago

Anyone have an idea how good https://qaul.net/ is?

I saw it shared at dweb camp and it seemed like a pretty long term serious project for P2P.

copperx• 7 days ago

Bitchat is great, but I don't understand why it's Bluetooth only. I would think Wifi reaches further.

rglullis• 7 days ago

Being p2p, network effects are even larger: you have to convince not only your own friends to install and use, but also rely on enough density in your area?

unethical_ban3• 7 days ago

Briar was unique in its ability to discover peers over local networks and Bluetooth - Very few if any other messaging apps do that.

Unfortunately the security/usability tradeoffs mean it never was going to hit Whatsapp levels of use, but it certainly fills an important niche.

mhitza• 7 days ago

Still receives, and for the foreseeable future will receive, security updates which is good enough for me to keep it installed on my phone.

nubinetwork3• 7 days ago

unreliable background operation on android

Pretty much every app I have has delayed notifications, and no matter of battery optimization settings can fix it.

dist-epoch2• 7 days ago

It seems to me this only happens if you don't use the app much. Or maybe some apps are "allowlisted", I've never had delayed WhatsApp/Slack notifications.

nubinetwork3• 7 days ago

I use twitch almost every day, its notifications are usually off by 10-15 minutes... /shrug

napkid• 7 days ago

Not GP, but most of the apps I use that works without Google Play Services (specifically, FCM) have this problem too. Vendor-agnostic notification on Android, and as far as I know iOS, is still painful. Ofc Slack and WhatsApp works fine : they use the Google notification system.

ozyschmozy• 7 days ago

I use signal a lot (probably has 30-60 minutes screen time per day), and still notifications are extremely finicky no matter what battery optimization settings I tweak. So I'm leaning towards some apps being blessed

Joe_Cool• 7 days ago

There should be a category: "Background Check" in the Android developer options. You can pretty finely tune or alter the automatically set priorities and permissions for background activity there.

I don't know exactly what the option is called but since Android 8 there is at least a toggle there per app. Later versions have lots more settings.

well_ackshually• 7 days ago

On Android, FCM notifications sent with priority HIGH are usually available within 30 seconds and bypasses Doze (unless you're on ultra battery saver mode). Notifications sent with normal priority run within doze windows, so every 15 minutes or more.

Unused apps also indeed go in different App Standby buckets, which while it shouldn't affect FCM notifications, it does on some older android versions (https://developer.android.com/topic/performance/power/power-...)

If you're not using FCM, well you're limited to having to check for notifications yourself, either within doze windows, or by registering a foreground service that keeps your app alive and checking.

ValdikSS• 7 days ago

Do you use VPN? This is a common misconfiguration of a server-side NAT related to too long or too short NAT timeouts combined with "act like a blackhole if we don't know anything about this connection".

nubinetwork3• 7 days ago

No, not on that phone...

foresto• 7 days ago

Some time back, I had a similar problem: the LineageOS Messaging app was frequently late with SMS notifications when the phone was in idle state. Adding the package to Android's deviceidle whitelist fixed it right up. (This was done with the dumpsys shell command, since the setting for com.android.messaging was not exposed in the GUI.)

https://source.android.com/docs/core/power/app_mgmt#testing-...

I wonder if this setting could help Briar, and if so, whether an equivalent could be built in to their app packaging so users wouldn't have to fiddle with it.

tadfisher• 7 days ago

Fairly sure the user whitelist is equivalent to "Unrestricted background usage", which should be visible for user-installed apps like Briar. I have a couple of apps that need this setting enabled, and there isn't an API or manifest flag to toggle it.

rvz• 7 days ago

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.

hermanzegerman2• 7 days ago

I doubt that Briar saw much usage at all.

fg1376• 7 days ago

So?

Does that negate any of the points?

HelloUsername• 7 days ago

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.

nunobrito2• 7 days ago

Instead of a fork, there is completely new development going on here: https://github.com/geograms/aurora

BLE/LoRa/radio/internet mesh with reticulum that combines chat, social and torrents over NOSTR (decentralized protoocol).

Still beta, around August should be stable.

monkaiju• 7 days ago

No way am I going to trust a heavily LLM-generated app as a replacement to Briar...

outime• 6 days ago

Not available for iOS though.

maqp• 7 days ago

https://docs.cwtch.im/ has P2P Onion Service based messaging.

marssaxman• 7 days ago

MeshCore is growing rapidly. Check out this map of CascadiaMesh - connectivity all the way from Vancouver down to Klamath Falls, and now east to Spokane:

https://cascadiamesh.org/map/

unethical_ban3• 7 days ago

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.

stackskipton• 7 days ago

It's both sad and understandable. So many Applications would want to be running in the background for data collection reasons or just user responsiveness. While it could be a permission, after watching so many people just hand out "Sure, have my location always and forever" to any application that ask for it, the OS would get totally overwhelmed.

This P2P system would probably only work if implemented by Google/Apple themselves and they have zero desire to do so since it's a feature almost no one would want.

Evanito2• 7 days ago

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 intentionally only included in Forum-mode chats in Briar. Over direct message, leaking contacts is considered a breach of security. (Your definition of "leak" may differ.) In group messages, only the group admin is considered trusted, and every message must go directly to or come from them.

In every security tradeoff, Briar chose the option that maximizes security, even considering how the airwave transmission times might be fingerprintable as Briar traffic.

Not saying any of this is a good way to make a useable app for wide adoption, but it is intentional and highly opinionated.

unethical_ban3• 7 days ago

That's a fair point.

The use case for allowing 1:1 DMs to be exchanged via courier is to maximize OpSec for whatever messages are being exchanged - I may trust Bob to deliver a message, but Bob may not need to know the message content.

The feature could include marking "approved couriers" per contact, perhaps? Both Alice and Charlie would have to set Bob as an approved courier for message exchange to each other.

exceptione2• 7 days ago

TIL Briar is text-only, per https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm

Evanito2• 7 days ago

Briar supports sending images. Source: user

exceptione2• 7 days ago

I stand corrected then. Although I had checked the website and the sparse UX details on the website only showed images of plain text. So this is an opportunity for the Briar people if they still feel the energy.

timcobb9• 7 days ago

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?

phoronixrly• 7 days ago

Because it is security-critical code. Throwing 200 dollars at anything that isn't a competent human developer is not only a waste of money, but will tarnish a very reputable project.

specproc• 7 days ago

It's a privacy-focused application for secure communication, last place you want slop.

timcobb9• 7 days ago

To me I seems like it was an attempt at a privacy focused application for communication, but it's now in maintenance mode.

fg1376• 7 days ago

Fighting complex technical and non-technical issues "with code" may be the most programmer way of thinking about things.

To begin with, that 200 dollars need to come from somewhere. Are you going to personally contribute to that 200 dollars? If not, someone needs to find money from somewhere. Then, I can assure you it's going to be much more than 200 dollars before you realize it.

timcobb9• 7 days ago

Who spent the time to make this? If those people spent countless hours doing it by hand, maybe they would be willing to spend an analogous resource? It seems reasonable to me if you've already invested so much and paid in time.

But yeah that's why I was asking if this was a non-code issue? Because they're presenting it as hey, we couldn't figure out the battery life in this post.

faefox• 7 days ago

Give that a try and let us all know how it goes. :)

timcobb9• 7 days ago

I would imagine pretty good if it's actually just a code issue

Kiro2• 7 days ago

I agree. These are classic problems where LLMs really shine. I would be very surprised if GPT-5.6 couldn't fix them.

no_wizard• 7 days ago

Claude, Copilot or JetBrains AI could also do it

timcobb9• 7 days ago

From the minimal context I got, it seems like there are underlying platform access problems in the way. In my experience, attempting to work around these issues is demoralizing.

palata5• 7 days ago

On the contrary, I think those are fundamental problems that cannot be solved by LLMs.

klibertp5• 7 days ago

Try it. The AI will probably tell you that it's, of course, doable. You would have to start by making your own AOSP distribution and require an unlocked bootloader to even attempt to install it. You definitely can throw an AI agent at the problem, but a) it'll be significantly more than $200, no matter how you cut it; b) you'll end up with tens to hundreds of kloc of AI-generated code in a security-conscious context; and c) you can forget about having more than a handful of the most desperate users[1]. Both b) and c) are fatal for a project like this.

The locking down of the Android platform, IME, is a massive, decade-long process[2] with "full speed ahead" corporate backing. Even just a few years ago, you could maybe code around some of the restrictions (if supported by users going into settings and tapping some checkboxes); today it's impossible even with root. To get working "push notifications" outside of the official channel, you need to hack the support into the OS - or accept that you probably will get the notification, but it can be anytime from a few minutes to a quarter hour before your app receives it.

[1] In which case, making them use tens of thousands of AI-generated code "for security" is a clear moral hazard you probably don't want to walk into.

[2] I don't want to judge whether it's a move in the right direction or not - that's a separate matter. But it is happening.

timcobb9• 7 days ago

Thank you! So in your mind, it would be a big investment of human time/tokens and the big obstacle, ultimately, is Big Tech?

palata5• 7 days ago

I don't get why you're being downvoted for that. It's a fair question.

In my opinion, the answer is that it's just a lot more complicated than it may sound. Using an AI may make them more productive, sure, but it will still be a lot of work.

It feels like they just haven't reached critical mass. Briar is a great idea, but if not enough people are willing to use it (and donate to it), then it cannot succeed, right? And the fact that they considered rewriting it from scratch means that it's not only a question of user base: there are fundamental problems that aren't easily solved.

P2P is just hard, as proven by the fact that there is almost no example of successful P2P system in the wild.

vmg122• 7 days ago

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.

allthetime• 7 days ago

Why? I use a similar model in a few mobile apps. Free, not logged in usage stores a restricted set of user activity data ephemerally (lost upon uninstall) in the phone. For subscribed users, this offline storage mechanism is still the primary storage mechanism, but then we add a cloud sync mechanism on top of it that enables usage across multiple devices and permanent storage in the cloud. Curious why you need to write the app twice when in my mind you are simply adding and enabling extra functionality on top of the core product.

vmg122• 6 days ago

One of the hard issues was supporting full text search locally and in the cloud. Also it's not that the entire app needed to be written twice but that parts of it needed it needed to be written twice.

dist-epoch2• 7 days ago

Is this still relevant in the age of LLMs? They can write it 5 times without sweating.

__MatrixMan__• 7 days ago

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.

imhoguy• 7 days ago

Briar will thrive once EU Chat Control 2.0 passes, P2P E2E encryption is the only way to bypass bullshit laws.

zelphirkalt• 7 days ago

Only, if they manage to improve it, so that regular photos and voice messages can be sent. I am mostly fine with texting only, but such things are an instant no-go for most people.

joecot2• 7 days ago

Briar is dead because it doesn't work on iPhones. It doesn't work on iPhones because iOS will only allow waking the app from background when there's a push notification. Push notifications have to go through Apple's servers, which defeats the purpose of a decentralized app where your messages (and metadata) can't be traced.

lou1306• 7 days ago

What about a "fake push" that does not leak message contents, sender etc.? Fuzz the time the push notification is sent by a random amount of time and you have something plausibly private given the constraints?

KennyBlanken• 7 days ago

There are numerous iPhone apps that don't need push notifications and sync just fine.

"Open source programmers do not understand how to code properly for iOS" != "doing things in the background is IMPOSSIBLE on iOS!!!!!"

People just love to screech about iOS/Apple being evil.

frollogaston2• 7 days ago

There is https://developer.apple.com/documentation/backgroundtasks which requires the user to have "background app refresh" enabled

tensegrist• 7 days ago

only insofar as it is 1. not illegal to do so or 2. the cost-benefit of violating such laws makes sense for the majority of users, who are not doing things that are actually illegal

because without such a critical mass of normal users you get something like tor or grapheneos that the state begins to associate with people engaging in unsavoury activity

dewey2• 7 days ago

No, because most people (not on HN) value convenience much higher than privacy.

grommz• 7 days ago

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.

rob74• 7 days ago

Plus people at the top level of the current administration just use Signal for discussing ongoing military operations and other classified stuff, so they don't see the need for solutions like Briar either...

ignoramous• 7 days ago

Nowadays every CIA goat herder has their own Starlink terminal.

Can the Starlink radio be sniffed? If so, it might act like a beacon, a tell-tale sign (especially, in countries where Starlink is illegal).

davexunit• 7 days ago

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.

api• 7 days ago

Mobile maintains good battery life mostly by being idle almost all the time, and P2P can’t work that way. Even P2P with central server assist is hard on mobile.

It could if we’d never broken the full end to end principle and put stateful firewalls and NAT in front of everything, but that ship has sailed. All net connections require keepalive or a firewall will close them. This is even true these days in the cloud for the most part unless your machines are “naked” VMs directly on the globally routed Internet.

Karrot_Kream• 7 days ago

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.

nyolfen• 7 days ago

at least two of its funders were usaid-backed (internews, access now), wonder if that has anything to do with it

collabs• 7 days ago

mskes me wonder... Could Apple do this? Like imagine only for iMessage platform but just like find my... For short text messages like let's say under 500 characters plain text or something obscenely tiny allow people to hop on other people's data or network access to peer to peer deliver messages over iMessage like we do with find my. Would be a great idea to think about in case of natural disasters? Maybe limit both clientside as well as server side to something like only ten or twenty outstanding messages per apple id at any time to cut down spam? Right and this becomes even more powerful when you add in Apple's satellite message service. So if a device can't reach the sky but is in reach of a passing person maybe we can get the message. It isn't panacea by any means especially with the rate limits but Apple is in this unique position to do something good if it wanted to. Ten is more than zero and people can forward message like I am alive and in so and so is worth more than a thousand mindless Instagram reel forwards. And maybe some day we can have this as a "global" standard but until then Tim Cook says "buy your mom an iPhone"

Briar is in maintenance mode

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