Delta Chat 4+
Chat over e-mail
merlinux
-
- Free
Screenshots
Description
Delta Chat is a messenger that uses the largest, most diverse and decentralized communication system ever created: the existing e-mail server network. Just use your standard e-mail account and start chatting with any of your e-mail contacts, whether they have installed Delta Chat or not.
Technically, Delta Chat is an e-mail application but with a modern chat interface. E-Mail in a new dress if you will. Chat and contact data remain on your devices. No uploads or centralized control of addressbook, calendar or other personal data. There simply are no Delta Chat servers where anything could be uploaded to.
Use Delta Chat with anyone out of billions of people: just use their e-mail address. Recipients will see a simple e-mail and may directly reply with their own e-mail app. They don't need to install Delta Chat, visit websites or sign up anywhere. If you send a picture or other media to a chat group your chat recipients will see a nice regular e-mail with an attachment. If they send a message and attachments back, you will see the media in your chat for this contact.
Delta Chat sends e-mails using your e-mail account and provider of choice. You can change mobile numbers without any trouble or even work without any SIM card or phone number at all. End-to-end encryption is established automatically when chat partners start communicating with each other.
Delta Chat is a relatively young project, but already has a lot to offer. It employs a pragmatic and usability-driven approach to decentralized messaging. No re-inventing of wheels unless one of them causes actual trouble or concern. We rather often think about removing technology than adding yet more of it, trying to keep things maintainable and understandable for us and others. Most popular programming languages and many human languages are involved in the development of Delta Chat apps and the various activities around it.
We are grateful for any help, be it contributing good bug reports, helping other users on the forum, participating in our open development with PRs and reviews, translations to more languages, working on new bots or setting up new experimental mail servers.
What’s New
Version 1.44.1
* show message content in notifications (previews are generated end-to-end-encrypted on the device and can be disabled in the system settings)
* summaries use emojis for attachment type
* "Message long-tap / Select More" added for read-only chats
* paste QR codes from any QR code page
* fix: open chats directly at the end, no more visible scrolling
* fix input bar displayed during attach or info sometimes
* fix: add white background to transparent avatars
* fix crashes when exporting or importing huge accounts
* fix: remove leading whitespace from subject
* fix problem with sharing the same key by several accounts
* fix remote group membership changes always overriding local ones
Ratings and Reviews
Great idea, too many downsides
The biggest problem for any new messenger is you have to get your contacts to join as well. Delta Chat half-solves this problem by ensuring that you can message anyone with an email address, so you don’t necessarily need them to buy into the Delta Chat idea as well. At least that’s the theory...
In practice, getting an email with a “Chat” subject is a little confusing and results in a lot of questions. For the best experience, including all the security benefits, you really do need both parties to be using the app. Unfortunately it’s a bit too daunting for the majority of users and to be honest I can’t figure out how Autocrypt is supposed to work in this implementation, and that’s being familiar with PGP and having read the Autocrypt documentation.
The other major downside is that the developers have purposefully not integrated push messaging for security reasons, which means messages are heavily delayed and therefore this isn’t suitable as an IM solution at all. Until the average user can have an experience on par with less-secure and centralised services, I don’t see this being useful except in niche situations.
Totally confusing
So when you first open the app it asked you to sign in. To do that you have to have and account, how you get one heaven only knows or you scan the QR code, what QR code
App Privacy
The developer, merlinux, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary based on, for example, the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Provider
- merlinux GmbH
- Size
- 51 MB
- Category
- Social Networking
- Compatibility
-
- iPhone
- Requires iOS 12.0 or later.
- iPad
- Requires iPadOS 12.0 or later.
- iPod touch
- Requires iOS 12.0 or later.
- Apple Vision
- Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- Languages
-
English, Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bakhtiari, Basque, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Catalan, Central Kurdish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sardinian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Location
- This app may use your location even when it isn’t open, which can decrease battery life.
- Copyright
- © 2019-2021 Delta Chat contributors
- Price
- Free