Tor Messenger Development Officially Discontinued

The developers of the Tor Project have officially announced the discontinuation of Tor Messenger, the anonymous messaging app first introduced to the public in 2015. Unfortunately, the project never made it out of beta testing. In their announcement, the developers provided a detailed explanation of the reasons behind this decision and listed several arguments in favor of ending development.

Background and Goals of Tor Messenger

Tor Messenger was initially designed to offer users a more secure, cross-platform communication channel. Its security was based on routing all messenger traffic through the Tor network and utilizing OTR (Off-the-Record) encryption. The messenger supported protocols such as Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook, Twitter, and others. The idea was for Tor Messenger to serve as a tool for communicating over existing social networks and instant messaging services. While the client-server model meant that some user metadata could still be stored on third-party servers, tracing the path to the server or deciphering OTR-encrypted messages would have been extremely difficult.

Reasons for Discontinuation

Although the core idea behind Tor Messenger is still considered sound and “workable” by the developers, after 11 beta versions, they decided to halt development. The blog post outlined three main reasons for this decision:

1. Dependency on Instantbird: Tor Messenger was built on Instantbird, a client originally developed by the Mozilla community. Unfortunately, Instantbird’s development was discontinued in 2017, although some features were integrated into Thunderbird.
2. Metadata Issues: The problem of metadata being stored on third-party servers turned out to be more significant than initially anticipated, and the Tor Messenger team was unable to resolve it. Third parties could still identify user behavior patterns, such as who was communicating with whom and how often, based solely on metadata.
3. Lack of Resources: The developers admitted they simply did not have enough resources. Even after 11 released versions, Tor Messenger remained in beta and never underwent an external audit (only two internal ones were conducted). Due to a shortage of personnel, the team had to ignore user requests and bug reports, which ultimately hurt the project.

Recommendations for Users

Now that Tor Messenger development has ended, users who value privacy and secure communications are encouraged to review the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s series of articles on the topic. For those specifically seeking an XMPP client, the developers recommend checking out CoyIM.