How your iPhone protects your messages
An iPhone is not simply “encrypted”. It has four states, and they are not equally safe. Almost nobody knows this — yet it is the most useful thing you can know about your phone.
This page explains what actually happens. Including the points where the protection ends. We would rather write down where a limit lies than hide it.
The short answer
We cannot read your messages. They are end-to-end encrypted — our server holds nothing but scrambled data, and we have never seen the key.
But your phone can read them. It has to, otherwise you could not see them. So the real question is not “is this encrypted?” but: when can your phone decrypt — and when can it not?
The four states
1. Powered off — the safest state
When your iPhone is off, everything on the storage is encrypted. The keys do not exist anywhere on the device; they are recreated only when you enter your passcode. Without your passcode, nobody gets to anything.
2. Just booted, not yet unlocked
You switched the phone on but have not entered a passcode yet. Almost everything is still locked. In this state our app can do nothing at all: it cannot receive a message, cannot open an old one, cannot even sign in.
You have seen this yourself: after a restart your iPhone accepts neither your face nor your finger — only the passcode. That is exactly why.
3. Unlocked once, now locked — everyday life
You entered your passcode this morning; since then the phone has been in your pocket, locked. This is the state your phone is in almost all the time.
And here is the honest part: the key for app data now stays in memory — even while the screen is locked. That is deliberate, because otherwise no message would arrive while the screen is off. A messenger that only works with the screen unlocked is not a messenger.
The price: someone who gets hold of your running phone and has the right tools has an easier time than with a phone that is switched off. The screen is locked — the door is shut, but the key is in the lock on the inside.
4. Unlocked
Everything is open. Whoever holds your unlocked phone reads along — no encryption in the world helps there. That is why we never say “nobody can read your messages”. We say: we cannot.
The button hardly anyone knows about
When it really matters — at a border, during a check, whenever you have to hand your phone over: switch it off. That moves it from state 3 back to state 1, the safest one. A restart does the same: afterwards your passcode is required again, not your face.
One long press on a button. That is all it takes.
Apple helps here: since iOS 18.1 a locked iPhone restarts by itself after 72 hours without being unlocked. A phone that is lost or seized therefore locks itself down again after three days at the latest.
What our app does
- Your access token lives in the device keychain, marked “this device only”. It never travels into an iCloud backup and never to another phone.
- Before the first passcode entry after a restart it cannot be read. The app stays silent then — that is not a fault, that is the protection.
- Your keys are created on your device. We never see them. That is also why we cannot give you back a lost history — the recovery key we show you once is your only backup.
- Signing out cleans up: it ends the session on the server, empties the keychain and deletes stored messages from the device.
What we do not promise
- We do not promise that nobody can get into an unlocked or running phone. That would be a lie.
- We do not promise to override a future law.
- We do not hide what we do see: who writes to whom and when, how much storage you use, and the names of rooms. We never see content. This is stated in our privacy policy.
What comes next
Planned, not yet shipped — so that nothing on this page describes something that does not exist.
The iPhone app will get protection against unwanted images: if you receive an image that may contain nudity, it appears blurred first, with a note. You decide whether to look at it.
This check runs on your phone, using a function Apple provides for exactly this purpose. The result is not stored, not counted and goes to nobody — not even to us. We do not even learn that it happened.
This is not chat control. The difference matters.
Under so-called chat control your phone would check what you send, before it is encrypted — and report a match. That is the opposite of what we are building:
- We only check what arrives at your end. Never what you send.
- The result does not leave your device. There is no report, no counter, no statistic.
- Nothing is matched against any external database.
- You can switch it off at any time.
- It serves you — not an authority, and not us.
In short: your phone takes a look so you are not caught off guard. We do not — we cannot.
Questions
Write to [email protected]. We answer within 72 hours.