Short answers to the questions people ask first.

No. Open Peers, pick a name and a little face, and you are in. Your identity is a key your device makes and keeps, so there is nothing to register or verify and no password. Delete the app and no account is left behind, because there never was one.

iPhone on iOS 26 or newer, Mac on macOS 26 or newer. Peers seals everything twice, and the second lock, the one built for a kind of computer that does not exist yet, uses cryptography that arrived in iOS 26 and macOS 26. Offering Peers on an older system would mean dropping that lock, so it does not.

If your Mac is older than macOS 26, TestFlight offers you the iPhone app instead and says it needs a Mac with Apple silicon. That message is about the iPhone app, not the Mac one, and it is the macOS version that is in the way rather than the chip.

You don’t search for them. Send an invite link or show a QR code. They open it, their phone knocks, and yours lets them in the next time Peers is open on it. A link to a private chat lets one person in. A group’s link can be replaced whenever you like, and you can ask to be asked before anyone comes in. Every link stops working after a week. There is no directory, so strangers cannot find you.

Every chat, one to one or a group, has two tabs. Chat is for talking. Feed is for sharing: videos, links, memes, photos, long reads. Posts in the Feed make no sound and add no number to the badge; the tab just gets a dot. Each post takes a heart and comments.

To post, use the Feed tab’s own bar, or tap Share in any other app and pick Peers. You can send one post to several chats at once. The link preview is made on your phone when you share, so your friends’ phones never contact the site.

All Feeds, at the bottom of the app, gathers every chat’s posts into one scroll, newest first, with a line where you left off. Each post shows which chat it is from, and anything you say back goes to that chat only.

If you made the group, yes. You are its op, and you can name other ops who can do the same. Removing someone moves the group to a new room that their devices are never given the key to, so it does not depend on their app agreeing to go. They keep the messages they already had. Every invite link to the group stops working at the same moment, and only an op can let them back in.

Anyone can leave a group. It is left on all of your devices at once, and the others see that you left.

A short, readable summary of a person’s key, the same on both sides. If the four emoji next to Ana on your screen match the four Ana reads out from hers, you are talking to Ana. If they don’t, someone else is at the other end.

On two iPhones you can skip the reading: hold the phones back to back for a second and both mark each other verified.

• Nothing to sign up with: no number, no email, no account.
• Your messages live on your devices, not on a company’s servers. Offline ones wait sealed for up to three days.
• People find you only through an invite you send. Your address book never leaves your phone.
• Every chat has a Feed, so links and memes don’t bury the conversation.
• Nearby, it works with no internet at all.
• Every seal carries a second, quantum-safe lock.
• The relay is a setting you can change, and the code is open.

Yes. An unread widget for the Home Screen, Lock Screen and Mac desktop; Live Activities for calls, voice-note recordings and transfers in the Dynamic Island; two Control Center switches, nearby on or off and a call to the person you talked to last; and a menu bar item on the Mac. All of it is drawn from a small note of counts and names the app leaves on the phone, never your messages.

Yes. No paid tier, no subscription, no advertising, and nothing about you to sell.

Press it and their phone shakes until they look. It rumbles on a Mac trackpad too. If you were online around 2005, you know what it used to be called. We’re not allowed to say.

Yes: “Send Ana a message on Peers”, “Call Ana on Peers”, or a Shortcut you build. These requests are handled on the phone, and the message is sealed the same way as one you typed. Nothing works while Peers is locked until Face ID has passed.

Your sealed pouch waits in a mailbox and is picked up when their phone comes back. Every message leaves a sealed copy there, even when you are both online, so a phone that was asleep or your other devices can catch up. The mailbox keeps each copy for up to three days, then deletes it, and cannot open it. Photos, videos and files up to 25 MB leave a sealed copy too, in a mailbox of their own, so their phone can fetch them while yours is off.

A locked iPhone does not run apps, and only Apple can wake one. Peers asks a small program run by OPUS to ring that doorbell. If it is not running, the phone picks the message up a bit later. New-message alerts are also delayed a few seconds on purpose. How the doorbell works.

Yes, if you are near each other. On the same Wi-Fi, or simply close by, your devices find each other and talk directly. On a plane, in a basement, anywhere the signal has given up.

Two iPhones can be paired once, through Apple’s own sheet, like agreeing on a table you both come back to. After that, photos, videos and calls go straight between the two phones at Wi-Fi speed whenever you are near each other, with no network in between. iOS keeps the pairing; Peers keeps nothing about it. While you have a paired iPhone, phones nearby can tell a Peers is around, the same way they can on the local network.

Yes. Voice and video go straight between devices, end to end. On networks that block a direct path, a relay forwards the encrypted stream and cannot listen to it.

On iPhone, calls ring on the lock screen like phone calls, show in the Dynamic Island while you do something else, and sit in Recents under the person’s name, with no number, because there is none.

No. Every message is sealed on your device before it goes anywhere, first for the person you are writing to, then again for the chat. OPUS holds no key that opens either layer, and no copy of your messages sits on any machine of ours.

A sealed packet, a random-looking chat number, its size, the time it went past, and the internet address it came from. Enough to notice that some chat was busy at some moment. Not enough to read anything, know your name, or know who you wrote to.

Nothing that identifies you. No account, so no name, number or address. The relay sees sealed messages, a random chat number and timing. The doorbell sees which phone to wake and when, and keeps nothing about anyone. Who learns what lists every party.

On your device, encrypted, and nowhere else. There is no cloud copy to request, subpoena or lose, unless you turn on the copy in Apple Passwords, and even then it is a sealed box nobody but you can open.

You, on the device that made it. Tap the text mark on a voice note and your phone writes it out from its own copy, using the speech model that ships with iOS. The transcript is kept in the app’s encrypted storage, never sent, and the person who recorded the note is never told.

Not on its own. If you have Apple Intelligence on, Apple’s writing tools appear in the message field, and when you use them your draft goes wherever your own Apple settings send it, on the phone or to Apple’s private compute. Peers sends it nowhere itself. With Apple Intelligence off, the tools are not there.

That their keys carry a second lock, built for a kind of computer that does not exist yet but that some people are already recording messages for. Every seal Peers makes uses both locks whenever the other side has them. If a friend’s four emoji change once when they update Peers, that is the second lock arriving, not a stranger; the shield appears at the same time.

That depends on one switch: Keep a copy in Apple Passwords, in Settings, off by default.

If you had it on:

1. Install Peers on the new phone and tap Restore from Apple Passwords on the first screen.
2. Face ID. Same you, same friends, same four emoji. Messages refill from your friends’ phones and the mailbox.

If you did not:

1. Install Peers on the new phone. You get a new identity and new emoji.
2. Ask your friends for a fresh invite.

Either way, if you still have a Mac or another phone with the account on it, add the new phone from there as a linked device and nothing is lost.

That a box for peers.opus.ro exists in your iCloud Keychain, how big it is and when it changes. Not what is in it: iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted, and the copy is sealed again with a key only your passkey can produce. This is the one feature in Peers that tells anyone anything new, which is why it is off by default. Who learns what has the full row.

Yes, under the GPLv3, on GitHub: the iPhone app, the Mac app and the doorbell app. Forks have to stay open, so nobody can take Peers, add tracking, and ship it closed under the same promises.

• The relay is a setting in the app. Point Peers at any relay, including one you run.
• The doorbell is a small Mac app. Run it on any Mac you leave switched on.
• Build the app under your own Apple developer account and it is independent of OPUS, while still chatting with everyone on the App Store build.

Technicalities has the details.