Briar Is in Maintenance Mode

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

> 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.

Briar supports sending images. Source: user

I doubt that Briar saw much usage at all.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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