Chatstead

Chatstead is a team chat app for people who run their own server.

There is no Chatstead cloud. You point the app at your own installation — a company VPS, an on-premise machine, or a server on your internal network — and everything stays there. Your messages, files and accounts never pass through us, because there is nowhere for them to pass through.

MESSAGES ARRIVE WHEN THE APP IS CLOSED

Most chat apps rely on Google's push service to wake up. Chatstead does not use any push service at all — it keeps its own connection to your server, so a message arrives even after you swipe the app away, and tapping the notification opens the right conversation. Nothing is relayed through a third party.

WHAT IT DOES

• One-to-one and group chats, in real time
• Typing indicators, online presence and read receipts
• Photos and files, with a proper download into your Downloads folder
• Voice messages
• Emoji reactions, reply, forward, edit and delete
• Search across your conversations
• Voice and video calls
• Light and dark themes, three accent colours
• English and Turkish

YOU NEED A SERVER

This app on its own does nothing. It asks for a server address when you sign in, and that server has to be a Chatstead installation. If your company already runs one, ask your administrator for the address and your account. If you want to run one yourself, Chatstead installs on a fresh Ubuntu server with a single command — see chatstead.com.

WANT TO LOOK AROUND FIRST?

Sign in against our public demo server to see how it works:

Server: https://demo.chatstead.com
Username: demo
Password: Chatstead2026

The demo resets every hour, so please don't keep anything there.

BATTERY

To deliver messages while it is closed, Chatstead keeps a connection open in the background and shows a quiet, permanent notification saying so — that notification is Android telling you the truth about what the app is doing. On some phones the system still stops background apps to save power; if messages start arriving late, the app will point you at the setting that fixes it.

PRIVACY

We collect nothing. We operate no servers that your data touches. What the app sends, it sends to the address you typed in, over an encrypted connection.