tinyclient
One native app for Slack, Discord, Telegram, Teams, Signal, and Messages. Small, local, and open source.
Website ·
Discord ·
Releases ·
Architecture ·
Contributing ·
Security
tinyclient is a chat client written in Rust. It signs in to Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, Signal, and Android Messages, and shows them in one window with one design. It runs on your machine. It talks to each of those networks directly. There is no tinyclient server, and nothing you type is sent to one. You can add Tiny servers you already run. That sign-in talks only to the server and, in your browser, the OpenID Connect provider that server uses. It is built for macOS, Linux, and Windows.
The project is early. The goal is a client that is a pleasure to use and does everything the official apps do, on every network, while staying small. Talk with us on Discord, or come help.
Contents
Why
The official apps are several copies of a browser. tinyclient is one small daemon that holds the connections, and a native window that draws what the daemon reports.
- Local first. Messages are cached in SQLite on your disk. Sessions live in the system credential store. What you type goes to the networks you sign in to, or to a Tiny server you added. The window also asks GitHub whether a newer release exists, asks Wikipedia for a summary when a Wikipedia link has none, and, the first time a Tiny call encodes a picture, downloads Cisco's OpenH264 codec. None of those requests carries a message.
- No telemetry. No analytics, no usage pings, no crash upload. A panic is written, with credentials redacted, to a
crash.log on your disk and nowhere else. About once an hour the window asks GitHub whether a newer release exists. That request sends only User-Agent: tinyclient/<version>. With automatic install on, the new copy is checked against the release's SHA256SUMS and replaces this one when you quit.
- Small, with budgets. Every feature has a memory, speed, and idle-CPU budget it must pass, measured from outside the process (
docs/product/07-budgets-and-risk.md). The target for the whole product, idle and signed in to four networks, is 150 MB. The budget for idle chatd is about one wakeup a second.
- Calls cost nothing until you make one. Voice runs in its own process,
mediad, for the length of a call, and again as mediad --play while a voice message plays. No audio process is running the rest of the time.
- Native, not Electron. The window is GPUI, Zed's UI framework. Slack, Discord, and Teams sign in inside
tinyclient-login, a separate process that exits when you are in. Signal, Telegram, and Messages sign in in the main window. Messages also opens Chrome, Edge, or Chromium for the Google account. A Tiny server's sign-in opens in your own browser.
- Never acts for you. No adapter sends a reaction, edit, friend request, or presence change you did not ask for. A conversation is marked read only when the window is active, the conversation is open, and the message is on screen. Telegram's own rules still send a read receipt and a typing indicator when you read and when you type. Signal sends those only as your Signal settings allow.
Sizes of a macOS arm64 release build, measured 2026-10-14. Later releases have not been measured again.
| Binary | Size | Runs |
|---|
chatd | 28 MB (Signal's libraries included) | always, in the background |
tinyclient | 22 MB | while the window is open |
mediad | 5.5 MB | during a call, or while a voice message plays |
tinyclient-login | 1.8 MB | during a Slack, Discord, or Teams sign-in |
What works today
Latest tagged release: v0.2.35. main is that release plus one commit: on a Tiny server that scans uploads, a file stays in the composer until the scan settles. The goal is full parity with each official app. Every gap is a place to help.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
