Berty, A New Offline-First Messenger

I just discovered the Berty messengers. It's an open-source (Apache 2.0 & MIT) offline-first messenger that looks like it has a lot more potential and polish than others. A messenger designed to function even without an internet connection, falling back to Blutooth to connect devices directly.

https://berty.tech/

What stands out to me is that it is already cross-platform, supporting both Android and iOS. This has always been something missing from most offline messengers. They mention it's possible desktop versions could be developed as well, if the community assists with it.

> With the help of community we could also implement universal BLE drivers for Linux and Windows.

It supports switching between multiple accounts; a feature I wish more messengers in general had.

By being offline-*first*, I hope they mean they will also support chatting online. Not supporting online chat as well I think is a feature that hurts the adoption of offline-only chats. Briar is the only other one I could find.

The group developing it has been very transparent about their goals and the limitations of the product. They won't claim it's secure until they get an independent security audit. Always refreshing to see people not over-hyping their product.

https://berty.tech/challenges

There is a working beta available for Android and iOS. I've found it's currently quite unstable, crashing at almost any point, but that's to be expected for early development. It's already showing promise for a lot of polish. And the bird does a flip; 10/10.

> Warning: Berty is still under active development and should not yet be used to exchange sensitive data.

https://github.com/berty/berty

I'm very hopeful for this project and will be watching its development. So far they seem to be doing everything right. I hope others will support it too.