I am aware of the irony of writing this in a proprietary app, but I spent a lot of time looking for something that would give me the same kind of presentation and user control, and short of writing an app from scratch myself, there wasn’t anything.
Corrections, additions, and discussions welcome. Shoot me an email at
Session is an interesting messenger that combines the decentralization and resistance against metadata leaks of a peer-to-peer (P2P) messenger, with the usability of a centralized or federated service, allowing messages to be sent to a user who is not online at the time. This is something normally not possible in P2P messengers. The issue with Session is that its protocol is largely un-reviewed by the greater security community, and therefore it is not known to be secure.