What Surf Messenger does.
Everything on this page is in the app today, with its limits listed alongside it.
Conversations
One to one, groups, or one voice to many. The controls sit with the thread, so both sides see the same rules.
Direct messages and groups
One to one, or up to 256 people. A group encrypts once per sender rather than once per member, so a busy thread stays quick on a phone.
Communities
One voice to many: an announcement room that only its owner posts in, with subgroups around it. Anyone can find and join one. Creating one takes a Sapphire subscription.
Message requests
A message from someone you do not follow back lands in a separate tray until you accept it. Blocking is enforced on the server in both directions, and the person blocked is not told.
Slow mode
A minimum interval between posts, set per thread at ten seconds, thirty seconds, a minute or five. The composer counts down and holds the send until the timer is up.
In a thread
What each of these tells the other side.
- Replies and reactions
- Quote any message; six quick reactions
- Editing
- Marked as edited, with a timestamp the server stamps
- Typing indicator
- Sent live over presence and never written down
- Read receipts
- Reciprocal. Limiting them to contacts, or turning them off, is a Sapphire setting
- Muting a thread
- Eight hours, a week, a month, or a year
- Chat themes
- Fifteen
Control over what stays
Set how long a message lasts before you send it.
Disappearing messages
Five minutes, an hour, a day or a week, set for the conversation. When a message expires, the decrypted copy on the device and in the backup goes with it.
View once
A photo that opens once. It is blurred until the recipient taps it, and no copy is kept after.
Archive
Move a thread out of the list without leaving it. It comes back when someone writes.
Starred messages
Keep an address or a flight number where you can find it, without scrolling back through the thread.
Finding things again
An encrypted chat is searched in the copy this device already decrypted, so no sealed message is uploaded to look through it.
Search across every chat
Words and voice transcripts, filtered down to links, media or voice, each result jumping straight to its place in the thread.
Shared media
Every photo, file and voice note from a conversation in one place, each still under its own key.
Calls
Voice and video, one connection per pair of devices.
A call connects directly between the devices on it and the media is encrypted on the wire. When a network will not allow a direct connection, Cloudflare's relay carries the encrypted stream and holds no key to it. The history keeps who, when, how long, and whether the call was answered, missed or declined.
Moving between devices
How your history reaches a new device, and what stays where.
Encrypted backup
On from the first message, sealed before it leaves the device, and opened by a recovery key you write down. It keeps up as you go.
Link another device
The new device shows a code, as a QR or a string, that you scan or paste on one you already use. The code lasts five minutes.
Several accounts, one browser
More than one Surf account can be signed in on a device. Each keeps its own keys and its own history, and switching between them drops nothing into the other.
A desktop build
The same app in its own window for Mac and Windows, signed in through Surf. The browser version installs from its own address on everything else.
The numbers
Every limit in one place.
- People in a group
- 256, all end to end encrypted
- People on a call
- 8 on voice, 4 on video
- Devices at once
- 5, the least recently used dropped first
- Files per message
- 10
- Photo
- 10 MB, re-encoded on your device before it is sent
- Video
- 500 MB on a free account, more on Sapphire
- Document or audio file
- 25 MB
- Voice note
- 60 seconds free; 5, 10 or 30 minutes on Sapphire, Pro and Ultra
Creating a community, changing who gets read receipts, transcribing voice notes and hosting a live game take a Sapphire subscription. Everything else on this page is on a free account. The group cap is the reach of the group encryption scheme; where it stops covers what that leaves out.