BitTorrent launches Bleep, secure peer-to-peer messaging app for iPhone and Mac

BitTorrent 1.0 for iOS iPhone screenshot 001

With ephemeral messaging growing in popularity, and given ongoing fear of government-sponsored snooping, small wonder that BitTorrent has now entered the market for secure chat apps — and in a pretty big way, too.

Bleep, their new Mac and iOS secure messaging and VoIP software, strives to ensure the privacy of your conversations by never saving them on your device or the servers. In a nutshell, Bleep uses encryption and peer-to-peer networking to establish a private, secure connection between devices.

With Bleep, you can whisper with friends on your Mac or iPhone and the messages will disappear after they are read.

“Every conversation is between you and your friends,” the company writes. “There is no cloud to hack because messages are never stored in the cloud.”

Moreover, Bleep supports making and receiving secure VoIP calls with the same peer-to-peer encrypted technology.

To prevent the creation of a local record of your conversation, you can “whisper” with friends and watch messages and videos disappear forever 25 seconds after they are read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cbH6RCYayU

Bleep highlights:

  • Sign-up with email, mobile number or just go incognito
  • Send and receive online and offline text and images
  • Make and receive voice-calls over cellular data or WiFi to other Bleep users
  • Import your address-book contacts
  • Invite friends over email, SMS or share your public key
  • Messages are sent fully encrypted and stored locally
  • Easily delete your message history

Bleep doesn’t require you to create an account in a traditional sense in order to use the app, as it relies on unique Bleep keys. Simply download Bleep from the App Store, create a nickname, invite your friends if you want and you can start chatting right away.

BitTorrent 1.0 for iOS iPhone screenshot 002

Of course, to find friends using Bleep you’ll need to add a phone number or email address to Bleep, but this is an optional feature. Again, the app uses end-to-end encryption, with encryption keys saved locally on your device.

Here’s how Bleep compares with other messaging apps

BitTorrent 1.0 for iOS comparison chart

If you’re concerned about eavesdropping on your communications in this era when privacy is a rapidly vanishing right, you should give Bleep — an encrypted, decentralized messaging software — a try. The app is available natively across all major platforms.

The BitTorrent blog has more on Bleep and what it took to engineer arguably the most secure messaging solution to date.

My only gripe with Bleep is the lack of a password protection screen so that no one can open the app if they gain access to the phone but I’m sure the team will add Touch ID/passcode protection in a future update.

I would have also preferred if they implemented some kind of protection against screengrabbing via iOS’s standard screenshot-taking shortcut.

Download Bleep free in the App Store.

Bleep for Mac is available via the official website.