this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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234
Onionphone - E2EE PTT Voice and Chat (media.piefed.social)
submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) by Used_Gate@piefed.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Onionphone is a native Android application for anonymous, end-to-end encrypted push-to-talk voice and text communication over the Tor network. No servers, no accounts, no phone numbers — your .onion address is your identity.

Cross-platform compatible with Terminalphone — call between Android and Linux/Termux using the same protocol.

Optionally use your connection as a relay for ephermeral group channels.

Find the release page for version 1.0.2 which supports custom bridges for accessing censored networks.

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[–] 0485919158191@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago

Super cool!

[–] night_petal@piefed.social 4 points 4 hours ago

This is extremely cool.

[–] shellington@piefed.zip 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Wow so awesome going to try it out.

[–] shellington@piefed.zip 4 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Nice a real step forward for private communication.

Would be awesome if it ever has a messaging section without having to make a call, still, an awesome start!

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

Would be awesome if it ever has a messaging section without having to make a call, still, an awesome start!

convenient in one app, but we already have briar for that

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 4 points 4 hours ago

I've put some thought into this. The biggest roadblock to P2P is 24/7 persistence. You have to be online.

I think the most straightforward path to this is having the ability to setup a mailbox sort of how the relay works but on a machine that's on a 24/7 stable connection. Because it's already cross compatible with Linux systems, it would make the most sense to have a dedicated mailbox there, and have it forward your messages that were missed while you were offline.

Once the mailbox is set up, it's just a matter of tieing the separate mailbox identity to forward messages to you once your online. Ideally integrate tors built in authorized client protocol to ensure only one person is authorized to the mailbox.

[–] fccview@lemmy.world 12 points 8 hours ago

This is stupidly cool omg

[–] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 34 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

@Used_Gate I suggest getting this in f-droid if you want to see more usage.

Also, it looks like the actual development happens in private and then is thrown over the fence; https://gitlab.com/here/_forawhile/onionphone/-/commit/2c4afc462a42852f0d54dda0b333db9019f3d69e

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 14 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, I am seeking that out to put it on fdroid and actually tried but ran into a few roadblocks.

I am tracking changes since v1.0.0 in the changelog. From here on out the changes are all public. The initial commit has no history because it was brand new, and the architecture was forked from terminal phone for cross compatibility.

[–] in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.social 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

How can I contribute?

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 10 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I need ideas for what everyone wants. Features and niceties to make the expirence more polished. I have a limited set of devices that I can test on so finding bugs and edge cases is something I can fix, but limited to my environments/devices.

I've played with the ability to have a dedicated secure database built in for contacts but unsure if it's really needed and worth implementing.

[–] in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.social 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Sounds good. I'll pull the latest build to my graphenOS test mule.

I'll target a secured db as a vault for contacts. That's a really good idea.

[–] vatlark@lemmy.world 23 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

This is sick! Thanks for sharing your project with us! I would have never guessed you could do voice over TOR but PTT was a clever solution. Its like the old nextel phones that had PTT. I wonder if its possible to remap the volume button to be a hardware PTT button.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 13 points 10 hours ago

Happy to contribute! So, currently (only while in the app for now) you can activate the mic with a double pressdown on volume if the setting is enabled.

My attempts to trigger the mic while outside the app came with a few unwanted side affects so I removed it for now until I find a solid way to do that.

[–] ddssazsa@piefed.social 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

What's the selfhosted component of this?

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Self hosting your own private P2P voice service.

Optionally use your device as a Audio relay for group calls, in which case you become the 'server' to all connected clients.

[–] IratePirate@feddit.org 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Self hosting [...] P2P

You do realise that's a contradiction, right?

Unless you're hosting a TOR node (which is outside of the scope here and, in the case of exit nodes, extremely risky), there's nothing here that's relevant to self-hosting.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 13 points 10 hours ago

I don't agree with that. Both sides are acting as a server and a client, connecting via a onion service to either parties rendezvous. And then when you include the fact that you can become a relay, that is clearly self hosting a server in a pure sense.

There are no exit nodes involved in onion services. It all stays within the network.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 5 points 11 hours ago (4 children)

Probably a bad idea to congest the limited bandwidth of Tor with voice chat.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 62 points 11 hours ago

The bandwidth is low by design. I've excluded files and images to keep it down as well. You could talk 24/7 only use MBs.

If we want Tor to grow we need useful applications useful for everyone. I doubt this will be widely adopted.

I've contributed a large amount of bandwidth to the network so why can't I use some?

[–] grue@lemmy.world 19 points 10 hours ago

Creating more mainstream use-cases is how you get people to donate more bandwidth.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 14 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Plain speech can be compressed pretty well. I'm not an expert by any means, but I suspect latency would be the bigger issue.

[–] Used_Gate@piefed.social 24 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Latency is a huge issue, but it goes away with the PTT model. I tried full duplex on initial prototyping but it was trash.

PTT solves this by simply forcing the listen, digest, then respond. You can expect about 2-3 seconds of delay from when you release the ptt, to when the other side hears it.

[–] Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 0 points 11 hours ago

Yeah, unless they use specific nodes given by the community, i think it's a bad idea