No number, no email, no sign up
Messaging without a phone number
Verus is a messaging app that never asks for your phone number, because there is nowhere in it to put one. No sign up, no email address, no profile and no directory anybody can look you up in. You get an address made on your own device, and the only people who can use it are people you handed a code to.
Why messengers ask for a number in the first place
Not because they are careless with it. A phone number solves three real problems at once, and it solves them well enough that almost nobody has bothered to solve them any other way.
It proves there is a person there, because numbers cost money and are hard to farm at scale. It gives the app a ready made social graph, because your contacts list is already full of them, which is why a new messenger can show you fifty people you know on the day you install it. And it gives you a way back in when you lose your phone, because the number is the thing you still control.
The cost of that convenience is paid later, and it is paid by you rather than by the app. Your number is permanent, it is attached to your bank, your doctor and your landlord, and once somebody has it they have it for the rest of your life. Anybody holding it can put a message on your phone without asking. And the account is now a record connecting a person to every conversation the account has ever had, which exists whether or not anybody ever reads the messages.
Every messenger that does without a number has to answer those three problems some other way. Here is how this one does.
What Verus uses instead
- Instead of registering: an address made on your device
- The first time you open Verus it generates a keypair on the phone and derives an address from it, in about a second. Nobody assigned it to you and no server issued it, so there is no record anywhere connecting it to a person. It is long, deliberately, because the length is what makes it impossible to guess your way to somebody.
- Instead of your contacts list: a code that works once
- There is no directory, so nobody can search their way to you. You hand somebody a single use code instead, usually as a square to scan or a link to tap, and it stops working an hour later. You choose at that moment whether the code says who you are or says nothing at all.
- Instead of anyone being able to message you: a request you answer
- Somebody arriving with your code has to ask before anything lands on your phone. Allow, decline or block, and give them a name only you will ever see. Nobody arrives unannounced, which is a property a phone number cannot give you.
- Instead of proving it is you with a number: proving it when you choose
- This is the part the other no-number messengers do not have. When a conversation reaches something that turns on who you are, you can attach a verified identity to it, checked by Confrmo against an identity document and a live face, and the other side can verify it independently. It expires, and you can revoke it, and the address underneath never changes.
Life without a number
Three things work differently, each by design.
You choose who is there. Verus never reads your contacts list. Every conversation starts with you handing somebody a code, in person or over something you both already use, so the only people on Verus with you are people you invited.
Your history lives on your devices. No server holds a copy of your conversations, because your messages are encrypted with keys that only ever exist on your devices. Add a second device while you have the first and your conversations carry across to it.
Proof instead of assumption. A number carries an unearned assumption that the person on the other end is who your contacts list says. On Verus you can ask for verification instead: a real identity, checked by Confrmo and shown only to you.
The other apps that do this
SimpleX has no user identifier at all. Session gives you an account ID generated on the device and routes messages over a decentralised network. Threema gives you an eight character ID and is a paid app. Keet is peer to peer and uses a 24 word seed phrase as your identity.
What none of them has is the second half. In all four, being nobody is the end of the story. The moment a conversation needs you to be somebody you have to leave the app to do it. Verus was built for that moment. The comparison page sets it out row by row.
No number. Nobody looking you up. Proof when you want it.
The Mac app is signed by Apple and installs today, and Android is on Google Play. The iPhone app is with Apple for review, so the list below is how you hear the day it is out.