Earth seen from space, two small houses on opposite sides of the planet, one thin green line connecting them directly through the dark

Photon

The first passless application: a messenger.
Live since July 2026, on real devices, between real humans.
No account. No phone number. No server holding anything of yours.

Two devices. One line. Ends: 2.

Download the Android APK →

Open it once it lands. Android will warn you it came from outside a store. It did. That is where things without accounts come from.

Get it on a computer

Click a command once and it selects itself whole, then copy. There is no copy button, because buttons need scripts and this page runs none.

Linux

curl -sSfL https://passless.org/photon/install | sh

To open a terminal: Ctrl+Alt+T on most systems, or search your apps for "Terminal". Paste there with Ctrl+Shift+V, press Enter.
The installer fetches the binary for your machine and has it verify its own Ed25519 signature before anything is installed. A binary that fails the check never runs.

macOS

curl -sSfL https://passless.org/photon/install | sh

To open a terminal: press ⌘ Space, type terminal, press Return. Paste with ⌘V, press Return.
Same installer, same check: the binary verifies its own Ed25519 signature before anything is installed.

Windows

irm https://passless.org/photon/install.ps1 | iex

To open a terminal: press the ⊞ Windows key, type powershell, press Enter. Paste with Ctrl+V (or a right-click), press Enter.
The installer carries the SHA-256 of the exact binary it fetches, stamped in at release time, and checks it before anything runs.

Every platform, direct

linux x86_64 · linux arm64 · windows x86_64 · windows arm64 · macos x86_64 · macos arm64 · redox · android

Yes, Redox. An operating system most people have never run has a build and most billion-user messengers do not.

Verify it

A download page that says "trust me" is a password with extra steps.
Do not trust this page. Check it:

Every release binary carries its own signature. The last 64 bytes are an Ed25519 signature over the BLAKE3 hash of everything before them. The matching public key is published in the source (src/crypto/self_verify.rs) and again right here, so the two channels can vouch for each other:
```
dff3af0c127c0bebe539c421da37993a517bfd78d2f5ee491d52fbf616444747
```
The quick check. The binary verifies that signature at startup and refuses to run if it fails; ./photon-messenger verify runs only the check. That catches corruption and tampering. It cannot catch substitution, because a counterfeit would happily vouch for itself. That is what the next rung is for.

The independent check. Verify the signature without running anything you downloaded. Any Ed25519 verifier works; the recipe is verify(last 64 bytes, BLAKE3 of the rest) against the key above:

python3 - photon-messenger-linux-x86_64-release <<'EOF'
import sys, blake3
from cryptography.hazmat.primitives.asymmetric.ed25519 import Ed25519PublicKey
d = open(sys.argv[1], 'rb').read()
k = bytes.fromhex('dff3af0c127c0bebe539c421da37993a517bfd78d2f5ee491d52fbf616444747')
Ed25519PublicKey.from_public_bytes(k).verify(d[-64:], blake3.blake3(d[:-64]).digest())
print('valid: signed by the key published in the source')
EOF

(pip install blake3 cryptography first.)

Keys this binary trusts: 1. The author's, the one printed above. Today, one person signs every release, and that count is stated here rather than hidden behind a company name. The plan on record is for that list to grow under democratic governance; until it does, the honest number is 1, and you deserve to know whose 1 it is.
Deepest rung: skip every binary on this page and build the source yourself. A source build makes you generate your own signing key and sign your own binary. Deliberate friction, because if you build it, you should know what you are signing.

Self-updates are checked the same way, automatically: each release ships a signed manifest (BLAKE3, size, version, and commit for every binary, Ed25519-signed), and the client verifies before it ever swaps itself. You never need to read VSF by hand to verify a download; the signature on the binary is the check.

These downloads stream byte-for-byte from the same artifact store the project's deploy publishes to. Nothing is re-hosted, so nothing here can go stale or drift from what the signatures cover.

This page is the download.
The source lives at github.com/nickspiker/photon.
The story lives at holdmyoscilloscope.com.