Zitrone is end-to-end encrypted messaging that disappears. No logs. No screenshots. No trace.
x3dh handshake · new key per message
Signal Protocol. Every message gets its own key. We store nothing readable. Not because the law says so — because it's technically impossible.
burn-on-read · 600ms
Burn-on-read. Timed destruction. 30 seconds to a week — your call. The server deletes the moment your recipient gets it.
FLAG_SECURE on every screen with message content — screenshots and screen recordings come out black, at the OS level, always on. Every chat also carries your own identity fingerprint as a faint watermark, so anything photographed off the screen is visibly marked as yours. That watermark is painted on your device and never leaves it — we can't see it, because we can't see anything.
scan to connect · no phone number
Connect by QR code. Your identity is a key pair we generate on your device. We don't know who you are.
Five steps. Zero knowledge on our end, start to finish.
Your device creates your identity. Keys never leave your device.
Share a QR or link. No personal info changes hands.
Every message encrypted locally before sending.
Server purges message the instant it's delivered.
Set to burn, or burn on read. Nothing stays.
Zitrone doesn't have a target demographic — it has a threat model. Four kinds of people lean on the same zero-knowledge, ephemeral architecture, each for a reason of their own.
You don't trust claims — you read the source. All of Zitrone is AGPL-licensed and public: the encryption, the relay, the apps. Zero-knowledge isn't marketing here — the server only ever holds opaque envelopes, and deletes them on delivery. And where something isn't finished, we say so; a known-limitations list ships with every beta.
No vendor in the loop. The relay is a Go binary, a Postgres database, and a Docker Compose file — stand it up on your own box in minutes. The protocol is open, the source is public, and every release ships a SHA-256 checksum, so you can verify exactly what you're installing before it touches your network.
The safest data is the data you never keep. Messages are store-and-forward only — deleted the instant they're delivered, with burn-on-read and expiry timers on top. No analytics pipeline, no ad model, no logs to subpoena. Data minimization isn't a slogan here — it's the architecture.
Communication built to vanish: burn-on-read, timed destruction, and plausible-deniability vaults where a second passphrase opens a second world — with no cryptographic trace the first exists. Everything at rest is AES-256-GCM inside a fixed-size image that never records what it holds. We're honest about the boundary, too: no app can promise “unrecoverable” against a forensic lab holding your unlocked device — so we minimize what's left to find instead of pretending nothing is.
Shipped, on Android, today. Some of it deliberately has no UI at all — the full walkthrough is in the how-to guide.
Android is the reference implementation and the only client you can install today. The other clients are in development, behind Android — they'll appear here when they ship, and not before.
Zitrone is open source. The encryption, the server, the apps — all of it auditable. Trust shouldn't require faith.
View on GitHub