Briar Desktop

A desktop program for Briar, bringing secure messaging to your desktop and mobile devices.

Note that Briar Desktop is still in a very early prototype stage and not yet functional.

For regular updates, check out the Briar tag on Nico Alt's blog (RSS feed) and watch the milestones of this repo.

Installation

We plan to distribute Briar for Debian (and related distributions) as .deb and via Flathub.org as flatpak, but until now, there are only semi-official installation methods available. You might want to use them now for not having to wait, but please note that those installation methods will be deprecated once Briar is available for Debian and on Flathub.org.

Self-contained Java .jar

The simplest way is to download the nightly briar-desktop.jar and execute it from the command-line.

Note that this installation method isn't yet available.

wget https://media.dorfbrunnen.eu/briar/desktop/briar-desktop.jar
java -jar briar-desktop.jar

Developers

Download Source Code

Briar dependencies are included as Git Submodules. To be able to build Briar Desktop, download the source code and the submodules using

git clone --recursive-submodules git@code.briarproject.org:briar/briar-desktop.git

or

git clone --recursive-submodules https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar-desktop.git

Intellij IDEA

The easiest and most convenient way to build Briar Desktop is by using Intellij IDEA.

Translations

See TRANSLATION.md for more information.

Maintenance

From time to time, translations and Flatpak's dependencies should be updated. The former can be done with tools/update-translations.sh, the latter using flatpak-builder-tools.

Design Goals

• Intuitive UI, similar to Briar Android client
• Main platform is GNU/Linux, but also support (at least) Windows and macOS
• Analogously, main platform is x86, but also support (at least) arm
• Adaptive to different screen sizes (desktop and mobile devices)
• Has phone constraints in mind

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.