Leave one trace: your email.
Avano is pre-release and we would rather you knew exactly what that means before signing up. Give us an email and we will send you the first builds. That is the only thing we ask for and the only thing we keep.
What “early access” actually means here.
We use the phrase plainly rather than as a softener. This is the honest state of what you would be joining.
Android runs today
A pre-release Android build carries the full messaging flow over Tor right now. It is hand-built and installed directly — Avano is not in any app store, so there is no automatic update and no way for us to push a fix.
iOS is still being built
The engine is cross-platform and the native app compiles and runs. It does not yet carry messages. We will not describe iOS behaviour as working until it is, so there is no iOS build to promise you.
Nobody has audited this
The message encryption is libsignal, which is audited. Everything we built around it has been reviewed by nobody outside this project, and the source is not published yet. What that means for you →
One email, nothing else
We take your email to send builds and we keep nothing else — no name, no company, no source tracking, no analytics on this page, no cookies of any kind.
Three things people are surprised by.
- Avano posts no notifications and there is no push on either platform. Messages arrive when you open the app; they wait at the relay until then.
- This follows from the app locking itself whenever it leaves the foreground, which is the defence that makes a seized phone worth so little. The argument →
- Your messages live only on your phone. No cloud copy, no export, no restore. If you lose the device, they are gone.
- Your recovery phrase restores your identity, not your history. Write it down somewhere safe before you need it.
- And there are not going to be. Three independent reasons, any one of which is enough. The argument →
- The signup endpoint is not live yet. If you submit the form and it reports a failure, that is real and it is on us — the form will tell you rather than print a reassuring message it has not earned.
- If it fails, write to hello@avano.app and you will be added by a person.
The email list is the only record of you that exists.
Everything else about Avano is designed so that nothing about a user is stored anywhere. This list is the exception: it is a genuine list of email addresses, held by us, and a valid legal order would reach it. We say so on the data inventory and in the law-enforcement policy rather than only here.
If that matters for your situation, do not use the form. Write to hello@avano.app from an address you are comfortable with, or come back when the build is public. Ask us to delete your address at any time and we will.