Blog

Delta Features for May - ECC Keys, Autodelete Messages, Scan QR Codes With Desktop

May 27, 2020 - New Delta chat releases! Thanks to all the early testers and all the work that went into the new releases on Android, iOS and Desktop. Here is an overview of what to expect: Read on...

Russia's request for Delta Chat user data ... declined.

May 01, 2020 - On April 27th we received a letter from Roskomnadzor, the russian supervisor of communications and information technology. They requested us to provide access to Delta Chat user data and register with their state-run provider registry. We declined for the simple reason that Delta Chat developers have no access to user data whatsoever. Read on...

New Delta/Desktop Release for Windows, macOS, and Linux

April 06, 2020 - Delta Chat Desktop does not only work well on all major platforms now. It also offers multi-account support, and can be used even without a mobile device. If you use it together with the appstore releases for Android or iOS, you can get a decent multi-device experience. Read on...

New Study on Multi-tool and Organizational messenger usage

March 31, 2020 - A new Delta Chat UX study is out, based on Xenia’s interviews with people engaged in human rights missions in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It focuses on how Delta Chat could or can already work well in conjunction with other tools and apps, and for organizational settings. Read on...

Shining some light on Delta Chat bots

March 26, 2020 - In principle it has been possible to build and run Delta Chat bots for quite a while already. But it wasn’t easy or well documented. We changed that a little bit in the last weeks, and would like to hereby push the beginning of a Delta Chat bots ecosystem into the open! Read on...

Saving Network Traffic - Delta's Efforts to Reduce the Message Size

March 11, 2020 - In the last months, the Delta Chat developers put a lot of focus on saving traffic. The result: current Delta Chat mobile releases consume far less data now. Read on...

Pin Chats, Provider Database, Offline Help and more

March 06, 2020 - In the first months this year we concentrated very much on fixing bugs, adding features and getting releases out - and a bit less on blogging and marketing. Read on...

Delta Chat Released for iPhones and iPads - Get it Now at the iOS Appstore!

January 09, 2020 - Until yesterday, you could only use Delta Chat on Android, Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Now you can have the Delta experience on all major platforms! Read on...

Delta Chat 1.0 with new features, more robust, faster and more secure

December 18, 2019 - After months of hard work, we just started the Delta Chat 1.0 releases series for the Google Play store, with lots of tangible improvements. Thanks to the many developers, testers, translators and contributors who made this happen! See below for details on all the good changes. Read on...

Women and Nonbinary People Learning how to Install Mail Servers - Delta Chat at /ETC

October 16, 2019 - Recently, I had the chance to attend the Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC) in Athens, a feminist event about technology. It was full of self-organized learning and open for women, non-binary, trans, and intersex people who loved to explore technology in a space far from the alienating IT culture. Read on...

UX and needfinding report Delta Chat

July 19, 2019 - Our final user-testing report is out. It summarizes a year of research with needfinding and UX testing activities and marks the end of our one-year “OTF Robusness and Usability” project funded by OTF. Read on...

New stable Delta Chat Android with improved group-profiles, video recording, notifications, ...

June 28, 2019 - A new and much enhanced Android version (0.500.0) is released and available on Google-Play and soon F-droid. It is the most feature-rich, UX-refined and robust version of Delta Chat to date and incorporates chinese translations now, along with updates to 19 other localizations. There now is a revamped Chat profile view which combines gallery, document, settings and member list in a new tab layout, apart from allowing to see “shared chats” with individual contacts. Read on...

New desktop release with RPGP, location streaming and improved mac & ubuntu builds

June 25, 2019 - There are new Desktop releases (0.104.0) with a new Rust-based encryption engine, RPGP, better Mac and Linux release packaging and several other UX improvements which we detail further below. See “Assets” on our github releases page for the respective Desktop downloads. Read on...

Location matters! UX testing, the Rustocalypse and other Delta Xyiv happenings ...

May 08, 2019 - In the last couple of weeks, location mattered deeply for Delta Chat, the “Chat over E-mail” messenger. It does make a difference if software development is situated in a Starbucks in San Francisco or around a refurbished coffee-bus in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital just 200km away both from a war zone and from Chernobyl. Some of you noticed already the appearance of “on demand location streaming” in the advanced Android app settings. This unique feature was only silently released ahead of our “Xyiv” gathering which happened in the last week of April 2019. This post provides glimpses into what happened that week – with foreshadows of the coming Rustocalypse and evolving new takes on enmeshing UX, crypto and implementation activities in the wider decentralization space. Read on...

Key findings of first Delta Chat UX testing in Kyiv

March 30, 2019 - Our first user-testing report is out. The user-testing took place in Kyiv end October 2018 and involved 12 testers, 10 coming from journalistic and NGO activist user-groups, and 2 being local tech-enthusiasts. The report highlights seven key findings and references some of the work that already happened since the testing happened. Read on...

New Android releases with OAUTH2 and improved e-mail interactions

March 14, 2019 - A new major Delta Chat Android release (0.200) is now on Google Play and soon on F-droid with lots of improvements addressing popular complaints and feature requests. Delta Chat remains marked as “Beta” because expectations are understandably high when it comes to using a new messenger. However, many of you know from everyday-usage that the Beta series work increasingly well. Please continue or consider helping us to evolve Delta Chat by providing feedback, contributing improvements or a little donation. If you join our channels you’ll also get to hear many of the upcoming good news earlier than here ;) Read on...

Play Store, OAuth2 and more from the dev stage

February 20, 2019 - As you may have noticed, Delta Chat is now available in the Beta Channel of Google Play. Read on...

DeltaChat multi-platform releases rolling ...

January 27, 2019 - A lot of efforts in the last half year are coming to fruition … release time! You can now use DeltaChat not only on Android but also on Desktop and iOS and chats are usually synchronized quickly in common multi-device settings. Nothing ever quite works perfect but it’s working well for many who used the incremental releases the last weeks, including for lots of private communications with friends. We consider our January 2019 releases, even if a significant milestone, only another beginning for more fun and interesting things to evolve … Read on...

DeltaChat Ukraine/Needfinding report / 35c3

December 19, 2018 - Our Ukraine/needfinding report is now out. It contains ten findings and “Delta.Chat takeaways”. Some of those findings have already influenced development, see “New planned features” from our november-blog post about our one-week Delta-XI gathering in Kyiv. Others await further conversations, bound to happen at the !decentral assembly at 35c3. Read on...

Delta-XI in Kyiv 2018… a lot of beginnings

November 17, 2018 - More than a dozen people gathered for a week in Kyiv, Ukraine for “Delta-XI”, with more things happening than can be reported… This post is a try to both give you some picturesque glimpses of the gathering and also highlight technical developments and results from the rich discussion and collaboration originating in Kyiv at the end of October/beginning November 2018. The gathering was intentionally intertwined with two user-testing sessions which Xenia and Vadym professionally conducted with select groups of journalists, trainers and activists early in the gathering week. There were also many other significant results which we’ll only briefly report up front here: Read on...

Decentralization Unchained

October 28, 2018 - After the “Delta-X” Event in Freiburg this summer, there is now “Decentralization Unchained” - one day of talks, workshops, discussions, hacking around the topics of decentralizing infrastructures in common, and, of course, Delta.Chat especially. Read on...

OpenPGPSummit 2018: The ecosystem is moving ...

October 22, 2018 - OpenPGPSummit 2018 in Bruxelles just ended but felt like marking a lot of new and promising beginnings. Overall a great collaborative, friendly atmosphere with lots of informal and side-talks … learned a lot. The clearly most important breaking news first: sat together with Kevin, the current mutt maintainer and discussed how to integrate Autocrypt, more specifically muacrypt – feel free to laugh but there is a surprisingly high demand for this combo so we both hope to get to this soon :) Read on...

Delta Chat android-dev state

October 12, 2018 - We’re currently working on a new Android App for Delta Chat, android-dev. Read on...

Delta.Chat desktop update

October 03, 2018 - We are working on a desktop application for Delta.Chat. It’s written in electron, based on the node bindings and partially based on the ui from Signal desktop. There are some early releases for Linux and Mac out already (Windows in the works). You can download them here. Read on...

support.delta.chat now working

October 02, 2018 - Two months ago, we experimentally launched the new support.delta.chat site but we only now sorted out problems with e-mail delivery and thus also registration. The support site is meant as an easier entry point for users who are not aware of git or github. Read on...

Big update on Delta.chat developments

September 28, 2018 - Following this blog or the mailing list you might think not much is happening with Delta.Chat but … nothing could be further from the truth :) An incredible lot has happened and is happening but communication happened in different ways: Read on...

Introducing the New Support Forum: Join to Help Others and Discuss Features!

August 19, 2018 - The Delta X Conference took place in Freiburg a few weeks ago, and a lot of cool stuff happened there. One of the things we have started there is support.delta.chat, the new Support Forum. Read on...

Delta Chat 0.18.0, improved reliability and more

June 21, 2018 - As you may have read on the mailing list, Holger and me met in Freiburg and dived deeper into how to make message sending and receiving more reliabile. Read on...

Time to relax: Delta Chat and the GDPR

May 24, 2018 - GDPR? It’s time to relax with Delta.chat :) Read on...

Delta Chat on HACKarnaval in Paris

May 16, 2018 - Janka and Holger are going to have a session in the track “Securité Informatique” on the HACKarnaval in Paris: “Delta.chat, introduction pratique” Read on...

Delta Chat not vulnerable to EFAIL

May 15, 2018 - You may have heard that the EFF has published advice from a group of security researchers, who claim that there is a serious problem with PGP encrypted e-mail. Read on...

Delta Chat 0.16.0 with Ad-hoc-groups; new Mailing list and IRC

March 19, 2018 - Delta Chat supports so called ad-hoc groups now - in short, groups can be created by any non-delta-client and are filed by the list of recipients. Apart from that, “ad-hoc groups” work like usual Delta groups. See issue #69 for more details and discussions. Read on...

Delta Chat 0.15.0 with Voice Messages, Elevate Festival and more

February 27, 2018 - Delta Chat supports voice messages for some time, however, there were some issues with them that we have fixed in Delta Chat 0.15.0. Read on...

Delta Chat 0.14.0 - Gossip-And-Setup-Message Version

February 20, 2018 - After months of working on different things but the Autocrypt Setup Message, well, finally it is done :) Read on...

Delta Chat 0.13.0 - Reply-Encrypted-Release

January 18, 2018 - Delta Chat 0.13.0 will reply encrypted if the chat partner has enabled encryption manually. Read on...

Delta Chat 0.12.0 - a minor release

January 07, 2018 - We’ve just released Delta Chat 0.12.0 with some minor changes and lots of bugfixes. Read on...

Details about the #34C3 Delta Chat session

December 28, 2017 - Details about the #34C3 Delta Chat session Read on...

Sessions on #34C3 and other news

December 21, 2017 - Sessions on 34C3 Read on...

Delta Chat 0.10.0, Semantic versions, APK

November 29, 2017 - New version out now Read on...

Delta Chat 0.9.7 (The archived one), iOS and docs

November 14, 2017 - We’ve just released Delta Chat 0.9.7, with some new major features: Read on...

Delta Chat 0.9.6 - a little bugfix release

October 18, 2017 - We’ve just released Delta Chat 0.9.6, a little bugfix release without new major features. Read on...

Delta Chat 0.9.5 - "Get your data out of there"-Release

October 08, 2017 - Here is Delta Chat 0.9.5 with a new backup functionality. The function writes all relavant data to a single file - this includes all chats, images, contacts, videos, voice messages, all files and more. When you reinstall the app later - either on another device or from another source -, you can import the exported file just in the “Welcome” screen. Very useful :) Read on...

Delta Chat on Desktop

October 02, 2017 - Currently the focus in development is the android version with all the features that other chats will offer. So the implementation of a native desktop client is postponed (or a task for everyone who would like to help). Read on...

Follow our news on friendica network

August 29, 2017 - You can follow our news now on friendica network. If you want to follow, please connect profile delta_chat@ennibook.de Read on...

Delta Chat 0.9.4, Group images, Status, Fixes

August 26, 2017 - Back from the summer break: Delta Chat 0.9.4 with new Group images, new Status functions, Locale updates and more is out - and already available on F-Droid just in this moment :) Read on...

A little summer break - Expect news end of August

July 28, 2017 - We’ve been working on various aspects of Delta Chat these days: Profile and group images, status, fixes and more. However, as some of us are in holidays these days, we decided to release a new beta version not today but end of August. In between we would be glad to get feedback, especially about the weired Read receipts some MUAs seems to send. Read on...