Briar is in maintenance mode
A niche secure messenger called Briar, known for its peer‑to‑peer, serverless design over Bluetooth, local Wi‑Fi and Tor, is being put into maintenance mode after developers concluded they couldn’t overcome modern mobile OS constraints. Commenters highlight how aggressive background and battery management on Android and iOS, centralized push-notification systems, and weak network effects make always‑on P2P messaging on phones technically and socially fragile. The case is used to illustrate broader limits of donation-funded open source, skepticism that AI can “fix” platform-level restrictions, and growing interest in alternatives like dedicated mesh radios and other P2P or mesh projects.
Briar’s Design and Niche
- Seen as unusually ambitious: fully P2P, E2E-encrypted, serverless, working over Tor, local Wi‑Fi, and Bluetooth.
- Local peer discovery and offline capabilities are highlighted as features few other messengers support.
- Security choices were very conservative (e.g., avoiding “courier” relaying in DMs to prevent contact graph leakage), prioritizing privacy over usability.
Usability, Adoption, and Platform Limits
- Many argue messenger network effects are brutal; if friends don’t switch, the app is effectively useless.
- Being P2P worsens this: you need enough local density or fall back to internet connectivity.
- iOS background and push restrictions are seen as a major blocker; Briar never shipped on iOS.
- On Android, aggressive power management and restrictions on long‑running background services make reliable, real‑time P2P hard without using Google’s push system.
Background Operation and Notifications
- Several users report delayed notifications for many non‑FCM apps; mainstream apps using Google’s push APIs work better.
- Technical comments explain Doze, app standby buckets, FCM priority levels, and whitelisting, but note that apps not using FCM must poll or run foreground services, with battery and reliability trade‑offs.
- Some think more tuning or OS‑level whitelisting could help; others say modern Android simply closed most viable paths.
Funding and Sustainability
- One line of discussion blames lack of paying users and donations for the project stalling; others counter that Briar likely had few users to begin with and that expecting volunteers to self‑fund is unreasonable.
- General concern that small, security‑critical open source tools are hard to sustain long term.
AI as a “Fix”
- A contentious thread debates “just use an LLM” to rewrite or fix Briar.
- Skeptics emphasize: security‑critical code, platform‑level barriers rather than pure coding problems, and the risk of large amounts of AI‑generated code.
- Supporters claim LLMs excel at tedious workaround code, but are challenged on practicality and safety.
Alternatives and Future Directions
- Mentioned or compared projects: qaul.net, BitChat, Meshtastic/MeshCore, Cwtch, Aurora/Geogram, Berty.
- Some suggest offloading P2P/mesh to dedicated radios (LoRa, external mesh devices) with phones as thin clients.
- A few speculate about OS‑vendor‑built P2P features (e.g., Apple doing mesh‑style iMessage), but note low mainstream demand.