About
An app that tells you what it cannot do.
Open the Settings screen and the first thing it says is that most of your messages are not encrypted. That sentence is the product.
Most software of this kind is written to sound safe. The claims are technically defensible and practically misleading, and they work, because almost nobody can check them. We decided early that Rindit would say the uncomfortable half out loud, in the place somebody would actually look for it, and would find out whether that is a business.
It shows up in small places. The app says encryption hides what was said and never that it was said. It says a new device starts with an empty history and that nobody, including us, can recover it. It says the registration lock cannot be reset even by us, and what that will cost you if you forget the passcode. None of those sentences help us sell anything. All of them are true, and a person who reads them can decide with the facts rather than the impression.
How it is built, and why that is visible from out here
The habit goes further down than the copy. Three examples, because the claim is meaningless without them.
The reasoning lives in the code
Not in a document that goes stale — beside the thing it explains, where whoever changes it next has to read it. Why a group's key rotates when somebody leaves. Why a passcode is tied to the account rather than the phone number. Why one number is stored and another is counted.
The rules are enforced by tests, not by memory
The colours are checked against contrast standards by a test, because somebody will change a colour for a good reason and never see what it broke. The documentation is checked against the actual routes, so it cannot quietly drift. The layering is checked by a linter rather than by good intentions.
Guards are verified by breaking them on purpose
A test that has never failed has not been shown to work. When we added a check that transparent images survive being resized, we switched the format to the wrong one first and watched it fail — otherwise all we had was a test that passes, which is not the same thing.
What we have not done
- Opened it to the public. Rindit is deployed and running — this is no longer a thing on a laptop — but it is not announced anywhere and nobody has been invited. That is deliberate for now, and it is the next thing to change.
- Had the cryptography audited. The scheme is standard and the implementation is ours. No outside party has reviewed it.
- Had the terms reviewed by a lawyer. They say so themselves, at the top, and they will not go near a payment until that changes.
- Shipped on Android. There is an iPhone app and it is in testing; there is no Android build and none is being written. Saying which half exists is more use to you than a roadmap.
- Got any users. Nobody is on it. That is the largest thing wrong with it and no feature fixes it.
Where it is made
Rindit is built in the United States and aimed at it — which is a real constraint rather than a slogan. The under-13 rule follows US law, the registration lock exists because SIM swapping is a common American attack, and the app is in English only, because pretending to serve every market is how you serve none of them.