Nothing to look you up in.
Chatterbox is an end-to-end encrypted messenger with no user directory. Nobody can search for you, because there is no index to search — the only way into a conversation is a link you hand someone yourself.
Seven things most messengers don't do
Each of these is a decision with a mechanism behind it, not a setting you have to find. Where something is a trade-off, it says so.
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There is no user directory
No username search, no phone-number matching, no “people you may know”. The only route into a conversation is an invite link you send someone out of band. Each link works once and expires after 24 hours, and a scheduled job deletes the expired ones rather than leaving a permanent record of who invited whom.
This is not a privacy setting. There is no directory to opt out of.
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There is no email address to keep
Signing up asks for nothing about you. Your account is a 24-word recovery phrase generated on your device, and the credential the server checks is derived from those words — what it stores is a random label under a domain that cannot receive mail. Your profile document holds no email address, no display name and no photo URL, so there is no profile for anyone else to read either.
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More than the messages is sealed
Message text is the easy part. Link previews and live location are encrypted to the conversation the same way — a location share is a stream of coordinates, and it is sealed to the other device's key like everything else. Attachments are encrypted before they are uploaded, so what the server holds is bytes it cannot open.
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Each message has its own key
Most one-to-one and group conversations use a ratchet, so compromising a device does not expose the messages that came before. Conversations where someone's client has not published the newer key material fall back to a single long-lived key, which does not have that property.
The label under a message tells you which one it actually got. It is not a claim about the app; it is a claim about that message.
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No AI reads your conversations
There is no summariser, no translation, no transcription. Nothing in this app decrypts a conversation and sends it to a third party to be processed, because no feature here does that. The reply suggestions are computed on your device from the last few messages, and go nowhere.
Those features are in the code and switched off for this release; they are meant to come back. Section 6 of the privacy policy still names the three services they would reach and says that nothing reaches them today. When they return, they return with that disclosure and a prompt before the first use.
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Looking something up doesn't happen behind your back
Tap a name in a message and Chatterbox shows you its Wikipedia article. That request happens on the tap and not otherwise, and nothing about it is written into the conversation.
An earlier version scanned the last fifteen messages of every thread you opened and queried Wikipedia up to thirty times per open — while displaying nothing, because the cards were behind a flag that was never on. It was removed rather than fixed.
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The privacy policy says what it cannot do
It states that the encryption has never been independently audited, that Google can see the metadata of every connection because we rent their servers, and that a key substituted before your first message would look entirely normal. It is the same text in the app and on this site, in 53 languages — not an English original with a softer translation.
Read it before you decide to trust any of the above.
What it actually does
Everything listed here has an interface you can reach. Nothing on this page describes a capability that exists only in the code.
Messaging
Text, photos, video, files and voice notes. Replies, forwarding, reactions, read receipts, pinned messages, bookmarks and scheduled messages.
Voice & video calls
Calls connect directly between the two devices over WebRTC when possible, encrypting audio and video by default rather than as an option. When they can't — often because of different networks — an encrypted relay carries the call without being able to decrypt it.
Reply suggestions
A few suggested replies drawn from the last messages in the conversation. They are matched on your device against a phrase list in your language — nothing is sent anywhere to produce them.
Wikipedia lookup
Long-press a message, pick a name in it, and read the article without leaving the chat. One request, on your tap, in your own language.
Your key, your recovery phrase
The private key that decrypts your messages never leaves your device. You can write it down as a recovery phrase; we do not hold it and cannot recover it for you.
53 languages
English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, Español, Français, Deutsch, Italiano, Português, Русский, Türkçe, Tiếng Việt, 日本語, 한국어, العربية, हिन्दी, فارسی, עברית, اردو, Polski, Українська, Bahasa Indonesia, বাংলা, ไทย, Filipino, Bahasa Melayu, မြန်မာဘာသာ, ខ្មែរ, ລາວ, தமிழ், తెలుగు, मराठी, ਪੰਜਾਬੀ, नेपाली, සිංහල, Kiswahili, Hausa, አማርኛ, Nederlands, Ελληνικά, Svenska, Dansk, Norsk, Čeština, Română, Magyar, Қазақша, Oʻzbekcha, ქართული, Հայերեն, བོད་ཡིག, Беларуская, ትግርኛ, Монгол — right-to-left included.
What you can lock down
App lock
Biometric or PIN. It relocks every time you leave the app.
View once
Photos and videos that close for good after they are opened.
Disappearing messages
Set a conversation to clear itself, from an hour up to thirty days.
Burn after reading
A message that destroys itself once the other person has read it.
Blocking
Block anyone. With no directory, they cannot find their way back.
Export & delete
Take your data out, or delete the account and everything under it.
What is not protected
A page that only lists strengths is a page you cannot use to make a decision. This is the short version; the privacy policy is the long one.
Sealed on your device
- The text of your messages
- Photos, video, audio and files you attach
- Link previews and live location
- Voice transcripts, once they come back to you
- Call audio and video, between the two devices
Visible to us, Google and Cloudflare
- That a conversation exists, and which accounts are in it
- When each account was last active
- The metadata of every connection, including your IP address
- That a call was placed, to whom and when — not its audio or video
- Both IP addresses, when a call is relayed to connect — never its audio or video
- The file name, type and size of every attachment you send
The encryption has never been independently audited. Removing that metadata is harder than encrypting the contents, and that work is not finished.
Get Chatterbox
The web app runs in a browser with nothing to install, on a phone as well as a desktop. The Android build is on its way to Google Play.
The Play listing is not live yet. Until it is, the APK is the Android route — Android will ask you to allow installs from this source the first time, and it does not update itself.
iOS is not released yet.