--- title: Briar is in maintenance mode | daily.dev description: Briar, the privacy-focused peer-to-peer messaging app, has entered maintenance mode. The team had previously considered shutting down due to unresolved... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/briar-is-in-maintenance-mode-xyuhfwutm twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Briar is in maintenance mode | daily.dev og:description: Briar, the privacy-focused peer-to-peer messaging app, has entered maintenance mode. The team had previously considered shutting down due to unresolved... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/briar-is-in-maintenance-mode-xyuhfwutm og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/xYUHfWuTM.png og:image:alt: Briar is in maintenance mode og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Briar is in maintenance mode **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Briar, the privacy-focused peer-to-peer messaging app, has entered maintenance mode. The team had previously considered shutting down due to unresolved longstanding issues including high battery usage, unreliable Android background operation, missing features like account backup and file attachments, and a difficult offline contact-adding experience. After receiving supportive feedback and continued user growth, they decided to keep the project alive in a limited capacity, focusing only on essential security updates and bugfixes. The team hopes to eventually make incremental progress on the core issues. The announcement also clarifies that earlier shutdown rumors circulating in the internet freedom community are outdated. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 3 discussions and 216 comments across lobsters, hackernews (as of 2026-08-11). **TL;DR:** The community is largely sympathetic to Briar's situation but sees its decline as nearly inevitable given fundamental platform constraints — Android's aggressive battery management, iOS's push-notification lock-in, and the inherent difficulty of P2P on mobile — rather than a failure of effort or vision. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 40% mixed · 45% skeptical **The case for** - Briar's unique combination of Bluetooth, local Wi-Fi, and Tor transport fills a niche no other mainstream messenger covers. - Continuing to ship security updates in maintenance mode is seen as a reasonable and responsible decision. - Real-world disaster survivors (e.g., Hurricane Helene) highlighted genuine value in offline-capable, serverless messaging. - The project's security-first design choices, while limiting adoption, are viewed as intentional and principled. **The pushback** - Android's increasingly restrictive background-process and battery management makes reliable P2P messaging structurally very hard without Google's FCM. - The absence of an iOS app (due to Apple's push-notification requirement) severely limits the potential user base. - The app's UI was described as looking dated, and missing features like file attachments hurt mainstream appeal. - P2P messaging inherently requires critical mass of nearby users, making network effects even harder to achieve than for centralized apps. - Funding model (donations) is seen as insufficient for sustaining a small open-source project long-term. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Broadly sympathetic to the developers and the project's goals, but the dominant view is that platform-level constraints from Apple and Google — not fixable with more code or AI — are the root cause of Briar's struggles. - lobsters (mixed): No comments were present, so no distinct take can be determined. **Hottest debate:** Whether the core problems are solvable with more engineering effort (including AI-assisted coding) or are fundamentally blocked by Apple/Google platform policies. **Open questions** - Could a hybrid approach — using anonymous or metadata-minimal push notifications — make an iOS version viable without compromising Briar's privacy guarantees? - Is there a sustainable funding model for security-critical open-source communication tools that don't have mass-market appeal? - Would dedicated external radio hardware (à la Meshtastic) paired with a phone app be a more viable architecture for offline P2P messaging? - Could Apple implement a Find My–style mesh relay for short emergency messages within iMessage? **Highlights** > > It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony It would, but I would argue that it wouldn't solve Briar's problem here. The problem on Android is not that Google doesn't want P2P to work. It's that Android optimises aggressively for the battery. You can install a mobile Linux and run a P2P service on it, that's not a problem at all. But you will have to charge it multiple times a day, and nobody wants that from a phone. Have you ever tried running an Android-based system without the Play Services (and without migroG)? Try running e.g. Signal without FCM, and see the impact on your battery life. You want to fork the OS to solve that? You will probably end up rebuilding something as centralised as FCM. There is a fundamental question there: does it work, without major downsides, to have a P2P system where the nodes are mobile phones? Until now it has always been a tradeoff, and people clearly choose battery life. Also you don't need P2P for privacy. > There's no reason to remain cautious because, well, right now we have _nothing_ Android is open source. There are big alternatives like LineageOS and GrapheneOS. I don't think we have nothing. There is a lot of great technical stuff in Android/iOS. While iOS is out of bounds because proprietary, Android is open source, so we have all that great stuff. We don't have nothing. > — [palata on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48926409) > 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. > — [klibertp on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48922636) > Anything that tries to read a "mailbox" on a smartphone is bound to run into difficulties. Smartphones manage to keep battery life high by keeping the modem inactive most of the time. The way to implement any mailbox functionality, i.e. an incoming message that needs attention, is usually done through a centralized push notification endpoint socket. Rather than wasting battery life polling multiple sockets, the OS listens to a single endpoint and farms out pushes that way. Of course to tune this precisely for battery life and for centralization of the platform, both Apple and Android have their own push notification services. Rooted or 3rd party smartphones can change the push notification service. Any service like Briar that wants to sit atop base smartphones will need to deal with this tension. A fallback is to poll intermittently for new messages, which when tuned correctly can indeed be fairly battery life forward. Of course then your messaging experience is lower bounded by your refresh interval. Modern smartphone OSes also will ruthlessly cut long-running connections in the face of power-save events on device. In general I think an external radio that you connect your smartphone to via Bluetooth, like Meshcore or Meshtastic, is a better experience overall than simply using a smartphone. Dedicated radios keep smartphone batteries topped up, and having the option to setup an antenna means that if you happen to be in an area where permanent radio setup is plausible, you can lean on good site characteristics, antennas, and filters. It’s hard for a government to ban radios altogether and ISM-ish band devices have a variety of uses in pretty much any developing or developed country (often used in small things like meters or monitors.) And for folks who just some off-grid data capabilities, this approach offers high flexibility without the burden of licensing. For folks considering going into this, I suggest joining Meshtastic or Amateur Radio communities. I find the further you get from amateur radio or networking communities (mesh* communities have a mix of folks and some can have pretty poor understanding of how radios work), the more the information becomes unreliable and more suffuse with political/social goals than matters like understanding signal propagation or congestion. If you’re in a developed country, Amazon likely has all you need to get started with the Mesh* world of LoRa UHF radios. > — [Karrot\_Kream on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48924198) > Helene survivor here. I will be spreading the word about this project and keeping some APKs for if the shit hits the fan again. FDroid being able to sync between local devices means all you need is to get fdroid onto someones phone. Wish they had an iphone app though! > — [ijustlovemath on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48922796) > It's really sad that both Apple and Google make it so difficult for background processes to run with user consent. The app wasn't even available for iOS because they don't allow apps to listen for messages outside the walled garden's polling service. Briar is a messenger app that worked on local networks, over Bluetooth, and over Tor if traveling the Internet. Fully encrypted and the purpose was decentralized, serverless messaging. I liked the concept, and tested it out a little on my Android devices. But it looked straight out of 2009, and it had the issues described in the post. Still. Thanks for the work. I hope it can get revived or inspire others some day. 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. > — [unethical\_ban on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921104) **Source threads** - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/pqq2gi/briar_is_maintenance_mode) · 2 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48919869) · 171 points · 216 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844400) · 4 points · 0 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [bitchat](https://daily.dev/posts/bitchat-mjk4hiufp) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Privacy Messenger Session Is Staring Down a 90-Day Countdown to Obscurity](https://daily.dev/posts/privacy-messenger-session-is-staring-down-a-90-day-countdown-to-obscurity-a2h6gn7xg) · It's Foss · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Instant Messaging Freedom's Discourse](https://daily.dev/posts/instant-messaging-freedom-s-discourse-qwxbn8sut) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Secure Communication, Buried In A News App](https://daily.dev/posts/secure-communication-buried-in-a-news-app-zgj9l65an) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [4 super smart shifts proving privacy is software’s new killer feature](https://daily.dev/posts/4-super-smart-shifts-proving-privacy-is-software-s-new-killer-feature-qqgoyouzr) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#android](https://daily.dev/tags/android), [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/briar-is-in-maintenance-mode-xyuhfwutm) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Briar is in maintenance mode","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/briar-is-in-maintenance-mode-xyuhfwutm","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/briar-is-in-maintenance-mode-xyuhfwutm"},"datePublished":"2026-07-15T14:55:45.198Z","dateModified":"2026-08-11T12:47:04.009Z","description":"Briar, the privacy-focused peer-to-peer messaging app, has entered maintenance mode. 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