Some settings belong to the phone: the radios, quiet hours, the notification sound, the lock, hints, Relay for Others, the clipboard preview. Others can differ per profile: how mail is fetched, the internet mailbox, read receipts, photos, translation.
At the top of Settings, This profile switches the view. With it off you are setting the phone. With it on, only the profile you are wearing. A profile with no setting of its own follows the phone.
Settings rows are named after what they do, and nothing more. The explanations are here.
Which paths this phone will use: Direct Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Local network, Internet. Switching one off hides its light everywhere. On Android a line under the Bluetooth switch says whether this phone can be seen by others. See Reach.
One reach setting is not here but on each contact's own page: Internet Fallback, which is how long a message for that person waits for a radio before the internet may carry it. It starts at 15 minutes. See Reach.
One question, three answers: Push, Fetch, On Demand. Choose Fetch and a second row offers Every 15 Minutes, 30 Minutes or Hourly. Under the This profile scope there is also This Profile: On Demand. How often the app checks while it is open follows the same choice, so there is nothing else to set. Quiet hours are on the same page. See Waking your phone.
A name people can write to without knowing your number or your address, shown here as your handle or None. Tap it to claim one, and to give one up. It needs a verified number or address on your card first, and that value is never published. Three to twenty characters, lowercase letters, digits and underscores. One per profile, ten across the phone. See Being found.
The phone and video buttons in a thread hand the call to another app. Calls is where you tick the ones you use: Phone, FaceTime, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram. An app you do not have installed says so.
On the other person's card you tick which of those apps know each of their numbers. Tap a call button and CHANNEL offers only the apps ticked on both sides. One match opens straight away; several show a chooser; none, and the button is greyed out rather than opening a dialog to explain.
The button says Call with WhatsApp only where the app really places a call, which is the dialer and FaceTime. For WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram it says Open in, because their links open the conversation and the call is one more tap. In that case CHANNEL puts the number on the clipboard on the way out, so you can paste it rather than come back here to read it.
Open With is the app a received location opens in when you tap it. The list holds the map apps actually installed on this phone, plus CHANNEL's own map. Long press a location card and every installed map app is offered, whatever this is set to.
Relay for Others lets this phone carry sealed mail for people it cannot read, and hand it on when it meets them. One setting for the whole phone.
Sound for arriving messages, and Translation, which chooses whether the phone's own translator offers to translate what you receive. On Android the banner and lock screen behaviour belongs to the phone's own settings after the first install.
Off unless you use it, and never silent. Back Up Now seals profiles, identities, contacts, conversations, avatars and settings into one file under a passphrase you choose, and hands it to the phone's own file picker: your cloud drive, a folder, a computer. We never hold the passphrase and cannot recover it.
Not in the file: disappearing and view-once messages, which were meant to go; photos and other attachments, for size; the app PIN; and the wake registration, so a restored phone registers afresh.
Whoever stores the file learns that a backup exists, its size, and when it changed. Restore… replaces everything on this phone and closes the app, so the next launch is a clean start on the restored data.
Your own account with OpenAI, Anthropic or xAI, or a server you run yourself. A key stays on this phone and our server never sees it.
claw.tail1234.ts.net:8080, and puts the standard path on the end itself, so give it the machine and the port and nothing more. Plain http is accepted here on purpose: a private network of your own is already encrypted underneath, and no certificate can be issued for a name only you can reach. The key field can be left empty, which is what most of these servers want, so Save asks for an address instead of a key. Nothing about that server reaches us: the words go to your machine and stop there.Runs the ten-step setup interview again, from the top, with your answers kept. See Getting started.
Three things belong to one conversation rather than to the phone or the profile, so they are on the contact's page and not here: Internet Fallback, which is above; Wallpaper, the picture behind that one thread; and Send as Text Message, which is the only way to write to somebody who does not use CHANNEL and the only thing in the app that is not sealed. See Messages.
One-line hints appear the first time a gesture is the only way in, such as long press for options, and retire themselves once you have used the gesture. Hints turns them off everywhere.
English is the reference text; any translation is a convenience. Help is stored on this phone and never contacts anyone.