Hotline Navigator

What the hell is Hotline?

Hotline is several things wrapped into one: chat and direct messaging, news and bulletin boards, and file sharing.

Hotline was created by an Australian teenager, released in the 1990s, and managed to reach roughly 1.5 million users at its high watermark. At its peak, the creator became involved in an intellectual property dispute that effectively ended Hotline’s development. Unlike many earlier file-sharing services, its truly decentralized design means it’s still active and can still be used on computers ranging from 1990s-era machines to current hardware.

What made Hotline special was how intuitive it was, and still is. With a double-click, it let anyone spin up their own private internet community, very much like Discord crossed with peer-to-peer file sharing, years before either concept existed. It was modeled after BBSes (bulletin board systems), but repackaged for the internet era.

Hotline Navigator is a modern client for Hotline, backward compatible with the existing network while bringing exciting new features.

Runs everywhere

One codebase. Six platforms. Native performance on all of them. Cross-platform doesn't have to be a compromise.

• macOS 11.0+, Universal
• Windows x86_64
• Linux x86_64, ARM64
• iOS 18.7+
• iPadOS 18.7+
• Android 7.0+

Features and Philosophy

Full Hotline protocol support: chat, file transfers, news boards, and messaging, in a multi-session, single-window interface designed to work at any screen size. It also includes modern features like TLS encryption support (with auto detection), ability to preview files without downloading, chat mentions/watch words, notificaitons and more. We've come a long ways since Electron Tauri uses the operating system's native WebView for the UI and a backend/application core, and is compiled to a native binary for each platform, even though it uses TypeScript and React for the UI. This means it's it's lean: a single binary for each platform is about 15 MB uncompressed (macOS is 30 MB~ as it's a universal binary). It's also isn't a RAM hog, RAM usage is often around 50-60 MB. It's also very fast and responsive, and will idle basically near zero.

Hotline Navigator's aim isn't to provide the most native experience on each platform, but to provide the a consistent experience and rich feature set across all platforms. I highly recommend users testing out multiple clients to find the one that works best for them, see the Hotline Wiki for a list of clients.

Also, personally speaking, I'm pretty elastic on the concept of software preservation. Hotline Navigator will always be backwards compatible with the Hotline protocol, but aims to support more modern features and improvements as they become available through collaboration with the Hotline community. This may mean extended protocol support that not be compatible with older clients, but that's the nature of software evolution. Hopefully with modern features and improvements, the Hotline network will offer a more vibrant and engaging experience for users.

This is client software only. Want to run your own Hotline server? Mobius is a modern, open-source server that works with all Hotline clients, and MobiusAdmin gives you a native macOS GUI to manage it.

Privacy Focused

Hotline Navigator does not collect, store, transmit, or sell any personal data. It also supports modern, 2026-era encryption with HOPE (Homomorphic Order-Preserving Encryption) and TLS 1.3, and it stores user passwords encrypted at rest.

Get it

Grab the latest release from GitHub. Desktop builds install normally; mobile builds require sideloading.