
Night Drop is a privacy-first 1:1 messenger. Like a night deposit box: every message is a sealed envelope, dropped for one person only, opened by no one in between.
* Anonymous identities only — no phone number, no email, no account. Your identity is a keypair held on your device.
* End-to-end encryption with the Signal Double Ratchet: only the sender and receiver can read a message.
* Peer-to-peer over Tor by default. There is no clearnet path — the only network egress is the Tor network.
* Local-first storage: messages live on your device. Optional server storage is opt-in, capped at 24 hours, and shows a persistent warning in the chat while active.
* An untrusted store-and-forward relay carries offline delivery only. Any relay ever holds nothing but opaque, already-encrypted blobs under unlinkable handles — no keys, no plaintext, no identities, no logs.
* Authorization before the first message: a stranger cannot message you until you approve them (scan a pre-authorized QR, or exchange a short code whose secret words block a man-in-the-middle).
* Safety-number verification (scan or compare) to confirm no one is in the middle.
* User-owned encrypted backups: the recovery password is generated on your device, shown once, and never sent to any server. Lose it and the backup is unrecoverable — by design.
* No analytics, no crash reporters, no ad SDKs, no Google Play Services, and no third-party push service.
* No automatic update check on F-Droid installs. Other builds (sideloaded, or the desktop AppImage, which have no update channel of their own) ask the Night Drop onion site over Tor, at most once a day, whether a newer version exists — and only tell you. The app never installs anything, and does not hold the permission that would let it.
Night Drop is free software (AGPL-3.0-or-later) and built to be reproducible: anyone can rebuild the release from source and confirm it matches, byte for byte.
WhatsNew:
Installed from F-Droid? Night Drop no longer checks for its own updates — F-Droid does that for you. Other builds (sideloaded, or the desktop AppImage) still ask the Night Drop onion site over Tor at most once a day, and only ever tell you; nothing downloads or installs on its own. "Update app" in the menu still works everywhere, and this is now spelled out in About.
The banner shown while your address publishes no longer promises "1-3 min" — it can take several minutes.