A PWA (Progressive Web App) is a website that behaves like an installed application. You open murmurchat.org in your browser, choose "Add to Home Screen" — and the messenger gets its own icon, opens full-screen without browser bars, and keeps working after you close the tab. Under the hood it is still web technology (HTML, JavaScript, a service worker), but from the user's point of view the difference from a native app is smaller than most people expect.
MurMur is built this way on purpose. You install it on an iPhone or an Android phone without App Store or Google Play, without an account tied to your phone number or email — your identity is a cryptographic key (an npub), generated on your device.
The stereotype that "web apps are toy apps" is about ten years out of date. Modern browsers expose most of the APIs a messenger needs:
There are real limitations, and we would rather list them than pretend they don't exist:
The absence of MurMur from App Store and Google Play is often read as a sign of an unfinished product. It is closer to the opposite — a deliberate trade with concrete benefits:
The honest cost side: store listing also brings discoverability and a baseline of trust that "a website" does not automatically have. MurMur is a young project with a small audience and no independent security audit yet, so we do not claim that skipping the stores makes it more trustworthy — the code is open source, and that is where scrutiny should come from, not from a review queue.
| PWA (MurMur) | Native app | |
|---|---|---|
| Install | From the website, seconds | App store, account, download |
| Updates | Instant, on reload | Store review + rollout |
| Push notifications | Yes (iOS: since Safari 16.4) | Yes |
| E2EE calls | Yes, via WebRTC | Yes |
| OS integration | Partial, browser-dependent | Full |
| Gatekeeper | None | Store policies apply |
No. Open murmurchat.org in your browser and add it to the home screen. That is the whole installation process.
Yes, as long as the PWA is added to the home screen (this is a Safari requirement, not ours). Notification formatting and reliability are somewhat behind Android.
Yes. Calls are end-to-end encrypted and use the browser's camera and microphone, which you grant per site.
You may lose the locally stored key, and with it access to your account — there is no SMS or email recovery. Back up your key. This is a property of the key-based identity model, not of PWAs specifically.
You shouldn't take our word for it in any case. The relay and client code is open source; the relay is built so it cannot read plaintext and stores encrypted messages only for a limited time. MurMur is young, unaudited, and small — use it accordingly, and read the code if you can.
Try it: open murmurchat.org, add it to your home screen, and see whether a PWA covers what you need.