Briar Is in Maintenance Mode

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.

> unreliable background operation on android

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

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

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.

> 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.

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

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?