Every message is sealed on your phone to the contact's key and opened on theirs. Nothing in between — not our relay, not the Wi-Fi, not a phone carrying for you — can read it.
The small letter on a message says which path carried it: W, B, L or I. See Reach.
Set a timer on a conversation and every message after that is removed from both phones once it has been seen and the time has run. Both sides see the timer.
A photo sent view once is shown one time and then removed. The recipient's phone shields it from screenshots while it is on screen.
Beside the composer: Photos (the phone's own picker, out of process), Camera (one picture, nothing kept), and Location.
Tap Location under + for the choices: Send my location (one fix, taken when you tap, never kept) or Share live for 15 minutes, an hour or 8 hours. A live share sends your position every minute while Channel is open and ends by itself; Stop sharing ends it sooner. Channel never reads your location otherwise.
A location arrives as a card, one per share, that moves in place as updates come in. Tap it to open the map in the app you chose under Settings › Location › Open With (the map apps installed on your phone). Long press for every installed map app, or to copy the coordinates. While someone is sharing live with you, a pin sits beside their name at the top of the thread; tap it to open the map without scrolling back.
If you have set up an AI account under Settings › AI, ✦ opens a sheet: your request, and a switch to include the last few messages of the chat. When that switch is on, the sheet shows exactly the lines that will leave — the other person's words too — before you press Compose. The reply is a suggestion; it goes into your draft only when you choose it.
Photos are sent as sealed attachments. If Send photos directly only is on, they never go through the relay: they wait until the two phones are near each other.
Both ways or neither. Switching them off stops you sending them and stops you seeing them.
Translation is done on this phone, by the phone's own translator. The text never leaves it to be translated. Turn it off, or choose which languages, under Settings › Notifications.
You can report a conversation. What is sent is the messages you choose to include, sealed to us, and nothing else.
English is the reference text; any translation is a convenience. Help is stored on this phone and never contacts anyone.