Introduction

There are a ton of 'private' chat applications in the market currently but I doubt any of them matches the level of privacy and anonymity that SimpleX provides. I have known about SimpleX for quite some time now but it was recently that I rediscovered it and realized how good it was. There are many reasons for this which I will get to, and also some issues I personally have with it.

What is it?

For those who don't know what SimpleX is, it is an open source decentralized end-to-end encrypted chat platform focused on privacy and anonymity. It is also a chat protocol that can be utilized by anyone. It utilises relays which you choose. There is no central server and anyone can host their own relay.

I recommend going through the official guide.

Sounds like a dream right and you may ask

"Is it too good to be true?"

Good question. If something is free then we are the product, this is true. However to decide if a platform is truly independent and free we must follow the money trail to know who controls it first.

SimpleX is a UK based entity (now owned by a US company) which mainly maintains the protocol and the clients across desktops and mobiles. They also host the default relay servers and notification gateways that come out of the box with the app. Revenue is generated mainly by:

1. Selling public names
2. Charging high volume groups and channels
3. Business messaging and customer support

SimpleX gets funding from angel and venture investors along with community crowdfunding and donations. There have been no reports of selling any data, running advertisements or monetizing through metadata as there are no user identifiers.

These things make SimpleX extremely hard to run as there are very limited options for the company to get money from. This makes the platform very volatile and some sources suggest that currently it has only 12 months of cash to run on.

The good thing is that they are handing out the protocol maintenance from the company to a new non-profit organization to ensure network neutrality.

What's wrong then?

My first problem with SimpleX is that the platform only makes sense on one device at a time. The sync is not that good, if I was using SimpleX on mobile for example and now want to continue on PC with all the chats without my phone, there is no way. I would have to keep my phone linked to the PC at all times which is a problem sometimes. It can maybe be fixed using the database export feature over relays and sharing the decryption keys manually among the devices (?).

Another thing to mention is that the AppImage was kind of broken for me on my pc but it could very well be just me...

The F-Droid build of SimpleX on Android refuses to use Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) because it leaks server metadata to Google (duh). So it has to keep a daemon running on the phone if a user wants instant notifications, which consumes background resources and battery. I don't really care as I am willing to keep checking for new messages myself. The Play Store build instead offers encrypted push notifications through SimpleX's own notification server: Google gets to know that a message arrived but not the metadata itself, and it saves resources too (so download from the Play Store if you want that instead of F-Droid).

So.. Conclusion?

SimpleX is a solid app. I think I would go as far as to say it is better than every other privacy chat app these days. It even supports Tor. There is a reason it is often considered the gold standard of private messaging among researchers and cyber security enthusiasts.

Want to chat with me on SimpleX? Click the button below, or scan the code.

Add me on SimpleX

PS: I was gone for a bit from writing blogs due to academic pressure but expect more next year!