Some projects you maintain. Some projects you live inside.
FireChat has been the second kind. For the past six months I've been rebuilding it from the ground up — not because v5 was broken, but because I kept imagining what it could be if I just started fresh with everything I'd learned from building it the first time.
v7 is that version. And I'm really glad you're here to see it.
A little context if you're new
FireChat is a chat app built around one idea: conversations should be able to disappear. You create a session, invite your people, talk — and when everyone leaves, it's gone. No history. No logs. No data that outlives the moment.
It started as something I built for a friend group. Somehow it found real users. That changed things.
What's new in v7
Real encryption. This was the thing I most wanted to get right. Messages are now encrypted with AES-256-GCM on your device before they touch the server. The key lives in your browser. I can't read your messages. Nobody can. v5 had this on the roadmap — v7 ships it.
Media that actually disappears. Images and videos now have a view-once mode. They show up as a locked card in the chat — tap it, the media opens, and that's your one chance. When a session ends, everything gets deleted from storage too. Not archived. Gone.
Song sharing. This one makes me happy every time I use it. Pick any track from iTunes and drop it into the conversation — album art, artist name, and a 30-second preview that plays right in the bubble. Music is such a natural part of how people connect and it felt wrong that it wasn't part of FireChat.
Push notifications. Someone invites you to a session while your phone is in your pocket — you'll know. It took an embarrassingly long time to get this right across multiple devices and browser tabs but it works beautifully now.
Your own profile page. Every user now has a public card at /u/yourusername. It shows your display name, your vibe note, your song. It's a small thing but it's a way to exist in FireChat even outside of a session. Go check yours.
It installs on your phone. FireChat is a proper PWA now. Add it to your home screen. It feels like a native app.
The part where I get honest
v5 worked. People used it. But there were corners of the codebase I avoided opening because I knew what I'd find in there. Auth had a redirect loop I'd been quietly patching. The message grouping was approximately right. Encryption was a comment in a TODO file.
v7 is the version where I went back and fixed all of it properly. It took longer than I expected and I learned more than I planned to. That's the best kind of project.
One more thing I'll be upfront about — a significant portion of v7 was built with AI assistance. Claude wrote a lot of the code. What that meant in practice was that I spent less time typing and more time thinking — about architecture, about edge cases, about whether the thing I was asking for was actually the right thing to build. The hard parts were still hard. Debugging a double push notification across three devices is debugging a double push notification across three devices regardless of who wrote the initial implementation.
I think being cagey about that in 2026 would be a little silly.
I'd love for you to give it a try. Create a session, invite a friend, share a song. See what it feels like when the conversation knows it's temporary.
And if you want to find me — fyrechatz.vercel.app/u/iam_fragrance.
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