Briar Is in Maintenance Mode
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Briar 项目已正式进入维护模式。虽然项目仍在运行，团队决定在可预见的未来将精力集中于必要的安全更新和关键错误修复，以确保在无法开发重大新功能或攻克深层技术问题的情况下，现有用户仍能正常使用软件。
多年来，团队一直在处理 Briar 在 Android 上的性能问题，包括高电量消耗和后台运行不稳定。改善用户体验也遇到难题，例如简化添加联系人流程，以及实现文件附件和可靠的账号备份等缺失功能。由于缺乏持续资金，这些问题大多只能在开发者的业余时间里逐步解决。
去年一度，团队曾考虑彻底关闭项目，认为无法现实地解决这些复杂问题，并开始为 Android 和桌面版本准备最终更新，以在停止开发后尽量延长软件的可用期。但社区给予了强烈支持，且应用仍在吸引新用户，促使他们重新评估决定。
最终，团队选择以当前的维护能力继续维持项目。尽管希望未来能在这些长期存在的技术问题上取得渐进性进展，但眼下的全部重点仍放在稳定性和安全性上。这一决定也回应了在 Internet Freedom 和 Privacy 社区流传的项目已关闭的谣言。
The Briar project is officially shifting into maintenance mode. While the project remains active, the team has decided to limit their efforts to essential security updates and critical bugfixes for the foreseeable future. This change in operational status is intended to ensure the software remains functional for its existing user base despite the team's inability to implement major new features or address deep-seated technical issues.
For several years, the development team has grappled with significant challenges regarding Briar's performance on Android, including high battery consumption and unreliable background operation. They also faced hurdles in improving the user experience, such as simplifying the process for adding contacts and implementing missing features like file attachments and reliable account backups. Because the project lacked consistent funding, these issues were primarily addressed in the developers' spare time.
At one point last year, the team reached a crossroads and decided to shut down the project entirely, believing that they could not realistically solve these complex problems. They began preparing final updates for the Android and desktop versions to ensure the software would remain operational for as long as possible after development ceased. However, they were met with strong support from the community and observed that the application continued to attract new users, prompting them to reconsider.
Ultimately, the team chose to keep the project alive in its current maintenance capacity. While they hope to make incremental progress on those long-standing technical issues eventually, their immediate focus remains exclusively on stability and security. This move effectively counters recent rumors circulating in the internet freedom and privacy communities that suggested the project had already shut down.
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- 在现代智能手机上构建可靠的对等（P2P）消息系统愈发困难，原因是激进的操作系统省电策略限制了后台处理，并封锁了对非标准通知通道的访问。
- 集中式推送服务（如 Google 和 Apple 提供的）虽然是维持电池续航与即时通信的唯一可靠手段，但依赖它们会削弱去中心化、无服务器架构的隐私性与独立性。
- 在 iOS 上无法正常运行仍是许多 P2P 项目的致命短板：Apple 要求所有推送必须经其服务器转发，这实际上形成了阻碍真正对等通信的"围墙花园"。
- 要同时实现本地优先（local-first）/P2P 功能与标准云功能，常常迫使开发者维护两套独立代码库，这对小型团队来说难以为继。
- 尽管有用户建议通过"用 AI 写代码"来克服技术障碍，维护者和资深开发者认为这些问题是系统性的而非简单的编码错误，并指出 AI 生成的代码不适合用于对安全性至关重要的底层系统集成。
- Android 加剧的平台锁定（例如限制后台服务、要求供应商专有的二进制模块 binary blobs）使得在不牺牲用户体验或不要求终端用户进行高级技术操作的前提下，几乎无法维持小众且专注于 P2P 的应用。
- 一些用户认为，像 Meshtastic 社区使用的专用硬件解决方案比智能手机应用更可行，因为它们绕过了消费级操作系统的省电限制，并支持更好的天线与无线电配置。
- 维护小众隐私工具需要长期且大量投入，但开源项目常难以获得稳定资金，零星捐款难以支撑持续且高风险的开发。
- Briar 在安全取舍上非常保守：它刻意省去如直接消息中的"机会性消息中继"（opportunistic message relaying）等功能，以尽量减少元数据泄露，宁可牺牲便利性来换取更高的安全性。
- 行业朝"默认安全"和系统无处不在的方向转变，造成了这样的环境：为了稳定性和便利性，用户自由被牺牲，这使得开发去中心化、用户可控的通信平台变得越来越令人沮丧且技术上充满挑战。
Briar 等项目的衰落反映了开源去中心化私人通信理念与现代移动操作系统僵化省电架构之间更广泛的系统性冲突。尽管这些应用曾试图提供独立于 Big Tech 的通信能力，但随着维持后台连接愈发困难，以及 Apple 和 Google 强加的技术约束，这类工具实际上已被边缘化，仅供技术熟练的少数人使用。归根结底，讨论表明：理论上可以通过"变通编码"部分应对这些问题，但对抗平台级限制所需的人力与资源巨大，在缺乏根本性且目前不存在的开放式移动硬件标准的情况下，很难长期维持。 • Building reliable peer-to-peer (P2P) messaging on modern smartphones is increasingly difficult due to aggressive OS power-management, which limits background processing and restricts access to non-standard notification channels.
• Centralized push notification services, like those provided by Google and Apple, are the only reliable way to maintain battery efficiency and instant messaging, but using them undermines the privacy and independence of a decentralized, serverless architecture.
• The inability to run properly on iOS remains a fatal constraint for many P2P projects, as Apple mandates that push notifications must route through their servers, effectively creating a "walled garden" that prevents true peer-to-peer communication.
• Developing messaging applications that offer local-first or P2P capabilities alongside standard cloud features often forces developers to maintain two separate codebases, making such projects difficult to sustain for small teams.
• While users suggest "throwing AI at the code" to solve technical hurdles, maintainers and experienced developers argue that the challenges are systemic rather than simple coding errors, noting that AI-generated code is unsuitable for security-critical, low-level system integrations.
• Android's increasing platform lockdowns—such as limiting background services and requiring vendor-specific binary blobs—make it nearly impossible to sustain niche, P2P-focused apps without compromising the user experience or requiring advanced technical intervention from the end user.
• Some users believe dedicated hardware solutions, like those used in the Meshtastic community, are more viable than smartphone apps because they avoid the limitations of consumer OS power-saving and allow for better antenna and radio configurations.
• Maintaining a niche privacy tool requires significant long-term investment, yet open-source projects often struggle with funding; consequently, relying on intermittent donations rarely provides the stability needed for ongoing, high-stakes development.
• Briar's commitment to security was highly opinionated, intentionally omitting features like opportunistic message relaying in direct messages to minimize metadata leakage, which prioritized security over ease of adoption.
• The current industry shift toward "security-by-default" and system ubiquity has created an environment where user freedom is sacrificed for stability and convenience, making the development of decentralized, user-controlled communication platforms an increasingly demoralizing and technically fraught endeavor.
The decline of projects like Briar reflects a broader systemic conflict between the open-source ethos of decentralized, private communication and the rigid, power-saving architecture of modern mobile operating systems. While these apps once sought to provide independence from Big Tech, the increasing difficulty of maintaining background connectivity and the technical mandates imposed by Apple and Google have effectively relegated such tools to a niche for the highly technical. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that while "coding around" these problems is theoretically possible, the immense human effort required to fight platform-level constraints is rarely sustainable without a fundamental, and currently absent, open mobile hardware standard.