Decentralized Messaging

License, age, maintenance and offline use

The table below covers every app on this page, plus I2P-Bote: whether it is open source and under which license, the year of its first public release, the latest release we could verify on Nov 13, 2026, the main language, whether it is still maintained, whether signing up needs a phone number or email address, and whether it can send messages with no internet connection. Facts come from official sites, app stores or project repositories, with a light link to the source. Where a fact is not published, that is stated rather than guessed.

2026 news

• Briar said on July 9, 2026 that it is in maintenance mode: the project continues, but only with essential security updates and bug fixes.
• In July 2026, during student protests in Delhi, India's Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) sent takedown notices asking Google to remove Bitchat, Briar and Bridgefy from the Play Store, Apple to remove Bitchat and Bridgefy, and GitHub to disable Bitchat's code repository. Officials told the companies the next day not to enforce the notices, and the apps stayed available.
• SimpleX Chat opened equity crowdfunding on Wefunder in August 2026, saying the app has been downloaded more than 3 million times and has about 480,000 monthly users.
• Delta Chat now spreads new profiles across three community-run chatmail relays so no single relay is a choke point, and announced in November 2026 that upcoming releases will drop unencrypted email entirely.
• The Microsoft 365 and Outlook outage that began on Nov 12, 2026 took nearly 24 hours to recover from, according to the BBC and CNBC.

Peer-to-peer email. Regular email already goes straight from the sender's mail server to the recipient's server over SMTP; see Self-Hosted Email for running your own. True peer-to-peer email projects such as Bitmessage and I2P-Bote skip mail servers entirely, but they cannot send to or receive from ordinary email addresses, and both have been quiet for years.