Verus

Confrmo ltd.

About this app

You do not need a phone number to use Verus. You do not need an email address, a username or a profile. When you open it the first time it makes a key on your phone, and the address people reach you on is that key's fingerprint. There is nothing to look up, because there is no directory to look you up in.

ANONYMOUS BY DEFAULT
Nobody can find you. Nobody can add you. You hand somebody a code, by showing them your screen or letting them scan it, and they arrive as a request you can decline. A stranger cannot put a message in front of you.

VERIFIED WHEN IT MATTERS
Some conversations need more than privacy. Verus can attach a signed identity claim from Confrmo to your address, which the person you are talking to can check against the service that issued it rather than taking a badge on trust. It expires, you can take it off, and the address underneath carries on working anonymously. Proving who you are is something you do, not something you become.

WRITE IN YOURS, THEY READ IN THEIRS
You type the way you always type. It arrives in the language the other person reads, and their reply arrives in yours. Translation happens on the phone in your hand, so no translation service is ever sent your words, and what the other person actually wrote stays above the line so you are never reading a machine's guess without being told.

NOTHING LEAVES THE CONVERSATION
A screenshot of a Verus conversation is refused by Android itself, not detected afterwards and apologised for. A screen recording captures a black frame. The app is blank in the app switcher. There is no export, no backup file and you cannot select the text of a message to copy it.

Nothing stops a camera pointed at a screen, and nothing can, so there is a faint mark across every conversation that makes a photograph of one say which device it came from, and a setting that keeps messages covered until you tap them.

MESSAGES ARE NOT STORED ON A SERVER
A message is encrypted on your phone and opened on theirs. The relay holds it, unreadable, only until their device collects it, and it records who a message is for and never who it is from. What the server does hold is small and listed in the privacy policy: your address and public keys, the dates you registered and were last seen, an identity claim if you choose to verify with Confrmo (including an email address only if you choose to share one), any abuse report you send and whether your address has Verus Plus. Never what you wrote.

IS IT STILL YOU
Signing up proves who opened an account. It does not prove who is holding the phone an hour later. Verus can learn how you type and ask you to confirm if that changes. What it measures never leaves the device, there is no request that carries any of it and it is off unless you turn it on.

ALSO
Messages that delete themselves, per conversation. Groups. Photographs stripped of where and when they were taken before they are encrypted, and the app shows you what it took out. Block and report on every conversation. Delete your account from inside the app, immediately.

Verus is for people aged 18 and over.

Verus is run by Verus Communications Ltd (17429651) and powered by Confrmo Ltd. What it holds, and what it is structurally incapable of holding, is published at verusapp.co.uk.

What’s new

A security and reliability update.
- Your contacts' keys are now checked against a signed record, so nobody can quietly swap in someone else's.
- Linking a new device shows a six-digit number on both screens to check before it finishes.
- Messages are kept safe even if the app closes while they are sending.
- Calls look up the other person over a signed request.