Blog

A big user surge and funding for decentralized scale

June 04, 2025 - Beginning June we witnessed a sudden surge of Delta Chat usage especially in the US and Cuba. We don’t know the social dynamics behind it but it probably helps that Delta Chat apps resiliently work on all platforms and offer a pleasing user interface which increasingly many families, groups and communities appreciate. Be that as it may, let’s look at some indicators of the recent surge, then highlight centralization risks and our mitigation efforts. Read on...

Delta Chat Desktop, but running inside of Firefox 🦊

May 22, 2025 - As part of the project to port Delta Chat Desktop from Electron to Tauri, we'll showcase a setup where our Desktop app runs in Firefox and does not depend on Electron or Chromium anymore. This video and post walks through what works already, and what doesn't and is generally aimed at developers and expert users. Read on...

DIFF Invitation June 7-17th

May 12, 2025 - During June 7-17th many of our contributors and from neighboring projects will gather in Freiburg in the Black Forest. We will use outsides and insides of the oldest “free and democratic school” in Germany, the “Kapriole”. DIFF currently stands for “Decentralized Internet Federation Fusion”. Read on...

Messaging editing, deletion and saving now available!

March 26, 2025 - No need to blush or melt in agony after sending a message anymore! Editing and deleting messages is now available in most app stores :) Read on...

From C- to JSON-based APIs of the Rust "core" library 📚

February 11, 2025 - This is a technical post about why we created the JSON-RPC bindings additionally to our CFFI bindings. Learn something about the internals of how Delta Chat is implemented. Read on...

Replacing billionairish platforms with ZIP files

January 23, 2025 - How can we evolve and deploy web apps without allowing developers or operators to become a “billionaire in the middle”? There are many ways to try to address this challenge and some involve the technical Internet protocol foundations. The “Web”, and the HTTP protocol in particular, arguably played a big part in producing tech billionaires with their possibly unprecedented power and money concentrations today. Read on...

Delta Chat introduces realtime Peer-to-Peer networking

November 20, 2024 - Are you interested in enshittification-resistant application development? After almost two years of collaboration with the wonderful Iroh team, and years of discussions with numerous experts in the decentralization space, we are happy to announce that Delta Chat 1.48 apps on all platforms contain state-of-the-art Peer-to-Peer networking support, including hole punching and forward-secret end-to-end encryption. Concretely, Delta Chat now establishes private Peer-to-Peer gossipping networks between users who start a webxdc app that uses the new joinRealtimeChannel() API. Read on...

Instant Onboarding and Instant Message Delivery

May 31, 2024 - A major milestone in our 6+ years long project history: With the rolling 1.46 app releases you can start chatting without a pre-existing e-mail address. Just provide a name and then tap “Agree and continue” to create a chat profile using the default chatmail server. Or visit other chatmail servers and tap the invite on their home page. Read on...

Hardening Guaranteed End-to-End encryption based on a security analysis from ETH researchers

March 25, 2024 - We released guaranteed end-to-end encryption in November 2023 and were in for a pleasant surprise three months later. The Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich handed us a cryptographic security analysis of our SecureJoin protocol implementation which is the basis of Delta Chat’s guaranteed end-to-end encryption mechanisms. We subsequently fixed 20 identified issues that became part of the v1.44 release but only disclose it now because we first wanted Delta Chat apps with all fixes to be available on all stores. Read on...

Four major usability improvements in Delta Chat 1.44

March 12, 2024 - Delivery time! The rolling Delta Chat 1.44 releases bring four often requested usability improvements. Visit get.delta.chat to onboard and invite anyone, instantly and securely, and without them needing an e-mail address or a phone number first. Some claim no other messenger suite today is as easy to onboard and use. True or not? In any case, we are already busy with preparing next usability improvements to avoid any doubts :) Read on...

Webxdc (Psst!) reclaiming Peer-to-Peer Web technology

February 15, 2024 - While blockchain projects hailed “decentralization” and “Web3” as a paradigm change, expending billions of dollars and development hours in the last decade, they failed to create even a baseline specification for packaging and running P2P web apps like the one we started in 2022 with webxdc. Read on...