Neither works on its own. If you don’t have Badger on your phone, you can’t run a companion — there’s nothing for it to pair with, and nothing it could show you.
That’s the encryption doing its job rather than a limitation we chose. Your conversations are end-to-end encrypted, and the keys live on your devices — never on our servers. A new Mac or a new browser starts out holding none of them, so it has to be let in by a phone that already has them.
Works straight away in a tab. If you use it more than occasionally, install it — one click, and you get a real app: its own dock or taskbar icon, its own window with no browser bar, and notifications. How to install it ↓
The same on every computer and every browser.
Every major browser can install a website as a real desktop app. It takes one click, and it’s worth doing: an installed Badger keeps itself signed in and linked, where a tab you visit once a month can get cleared out by the browser and need linking again.
Because it wouldn’t be a better Badger than the one you can already run. We built a native Mac app and then measured what it actually added over the installed web one: a dock badge instead of a tab badge, and drag-and-drop of files. That’s it — everything else a companion can’t do, like publishing your location or reaching your camera roll, it can’t do either way, because that’s your phone’s job.
Meanwhile the web version is better at the thing that matters most for encrypted messaging: it can be woken to collect new keys whenever your browser is running, where a quit Mac app can’t be woken at all. So a download would have been a bigger thing to keep working, in exchange for less.
If that ever changes we’ll build it. It isn’t a matter of principle — it’s that right now the honest answer is “install the web one”.
Haven’t got Badger yet? Get Badger for your phone first.
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