Australian Homegrown...

Australian Homegrown Messaging App ‘Session’ Surpasses 1 Million Downloads

By José Oramas January 31, 2022 In Australia, Crypto News, Oxen, Privacy

Session, an Australian born decentralised messaging platform running on the Oxen privacy network, hit a milestone at the beginning of this year by crossing 1 million downloads on the Google Play Store.

500% Growth Throughout 2021

Session is an end-to-end encrypted messaging application that runs on Oxen, a privacy-focused ecosystem supported by the $OXEN coin. Session runs on Oxen’s 1,700-plus community-driven nodes to store and route messages. Unlike P2P messaging apps, however, Session users can chat with each other when they are offline.

Session now has over 1 million downloads in the Play Store – and we're only just getting started.

Strap yourself in for 2022. It's going to be our biggest year yet.#GetSession pic.twitter.com/W7Hnj9l3dq
— Session (@session_app) January 17, 2022

In 2021 Session witnessed 500 percent growth, and this year’s early milestone is a clear signal that users are more drawn than ever to privacy-focused, decentralised applications.

A million downloads is a huge milestone for us, we’ve been working towards this for a couple of years, and we’re expecting even bigger growth this year. Session is proof that people want to use decentralised applications — you just have to build good ones.

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Kee Jefferys, Oxen CTO

Data Privacy and Anonymity

Session messages are onion-routed, a technique where messages are wrapped under layers of encryption, preventing traffic analysis eavesdropping (theft of information).

Unlike other messaging platforms, which compile meaningful information about the user, every encrypted message is routed through three nodes in the Oxen Service Node Network, making it virtually impossible for the nodes to compile sensitive data from the user.

Comparison of sensitive data from several messaging applications.

When users sign up to Session, their devices generate a Session ID, which is the sole contact information on the app – you don’t need your phone number or any other type of personal information to generate a Session ID.

Because of the design of the Session protocol, users can have extreme confidence that whenever they send a message that only the person they send it to will be able to know the message contents, who they messaged, and when they sent the message.
Session whitepaper

The Session app also has some really cool features such as the ability to unsend messages which deletes the message completely from both the sender and recipient devices.