SimpleX Chat
FreeA messenger with no user identifiers at all
An encrypted messenger with no user identifiers whatsoever — no account, no username, no phone number, not even a random ID. Contacts are added through one-time links or QR codes, and messages travel through unidirectional queues, so servers cannot tell who is talking to whom.
Why we picked it
Signal is already privacy-focused, but it still needs your phone number — and a phone number is an identifier that maps to a person. SimpleX goes further: have no identifier at all. There is no account system, you have no "identity" on the network, and contacts are added by sending a one-time link or scanning a QR code that creates a channel exclusive to the two of you.
Technically, each pair of contacts gets two separate unidirectional message queues, which can sit on different relay servers. The result is that a server sees a pile of unrelated queues and cannot reconstruct a social graph. For "who is talking to whom" metadata, this is among the most thorough designs shipping in a real messenger. 19,255 stars, AGPL-3.0, and you can run your own relays.
The costs are real and you should know them upfront:
- There is no user directory. You cannot search for anyone; contact details must be exchanged out of band, in person or over another channel.
- Moving devices is manual. No account means no "log in and restore" — you back up the database file yourself. Lose it and it is genuinely gone.
- Notification latency on iOS is constrained by system limits and is not as instant as mainstream apps.
Who it suits: journalists, researchers, or anyone in a situation where even the fact that a conversation exists should not be observable. For everyday chats with family and friends, Signal's balance is the more practical one.