Talon — chat for Urbit

What it does

Direct messages 1:1 messages with anyone on the network. Same wire as the rest of Urbit — your existing chats appear immediately.
Group channels Read and post in any chat channel of any group your ship belongs to. Pinned posts, drag-reorder, custom folders.
Notebooks & galleries Read and reply to long-form notebook posts (%diary) and image-grid gallery posts (%heap) inside the same UI.
Reactions & threads Full emoji set. Long-press for actions. Replies live in inline threads, not separate views.
Polls /poll question | a | b | c — votes ride on the existing reactions wire, no new agent state.
Semantic search Find that chat you half-remember. On-device embedder — MediaPipe on Android, ONNX MiniLM-L6 on desktop. Private; nothing leaves your machine.
Daily digest Optional morning brief: who pinged you, what watchwords matched, the chats you missed. Local AI summary, plus today's weather. (Android only — depends on AlarmManager.)
Watchwords Cross-channel keyword alerts. Tracks any term you care about across every chat your ship sees, foreground or background.
AI features Catch-me-up summaries and emoji-react suggestions, using your own OpenAI / Anthropic / compatible API key. Off by default. Key encrypted on-device.
Voice messages Record, send, and play back voice notes inline. On-device transcription on devices that support it.
Native notifications libnotify on Linux, Notification Center on macOS, system toasts on Windows + Android — no AWT-balloon ugliness.
Multi-ship at once Sign in to as many ships as you like; switch from the top-left. The active ship's color tints the send button, so you don't accidentally post as the wrong identity in shared groups.

What it isn't

Not a host. Bring your own ship — yours, or one a friend hosts for you, or one of the hosting services.
Not Tlon. Talon talks to the same agents but is an independent client. If you already use a Tlon-hosted ship, Talon sees your full history immediately.
Not on the Play Store today. Sideload from GitHub Releases; the in-app updater handles future versions on Android.
Desktop builds are unsigned for now — Gatekeeper / SmartScreen will warn on first launch and you have to bypass it.

Privacy

The only servers Talon talks to are yours.

There's no analytics, no third-party SDKs, no telemetry. The app speaks to the Urbit ship you point it at, and — if you turn on AI features — the AI provider whose key you've entered. That's the entire network surface.

API keys are stored encrypted on-device via AndroidX Security and only transmitted to the provider you select. They never reach the Talon developer.

Under the hood

Kotlin + Compose Multiplatform. ~26k lines of shared code across Android + JVM Desktop; per-platform leaves only where they have to be (file pickers, on-device AI backends, daily-digest scheduling, native notifications). Room for local storage, OkHttp for the SSE channel, kotlinx.serialization for everything on the wire. Mutation-tested at ~97% on the parsers and wire helpers; ~558 unit tests across the JVM test suite.

android

8.0+ (API 26-35)

desktop

Linux · macOS · Windows · JRE bundled

backend

Your Urbit ship

license

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0

Download

Pick your platform. Direct download links resolve to the latest tagged release; fall back to the releases page for older versions, signature checksums, and release notes.

Android

On install: tap the APK; you may need to allow "Install unknown apps" for your browser or file manager. Future updates land via the in-app banner.

arm64-v8a Most modern Android phones (~25 MB). Pick this one if unsure. Download

armeabi-v7a Older 32-bit ARM devices (~20 MB). Download

x86_64 Emulators / x86 tablets (~18 MB). Download

universal Larger fallback (~54 MB) — works on every supported ABI. Download

Linux

chmod +x the AppImage and run it; needs FUSE 2 (default on most desktops). The .deb installs system-wide on Debian / Ubuntu and derivatives.

AppImage (any) Portable, self-contained, ~91 MB. Bundled JRE. Download

.deb (Debian / Ubuntu) sudo apt install ./talon_*.deb Download

macOS

Open the DMG and drag Talon to Applications. First launch: right-click → Open → Open. (Unsigned, so a normal double-click is blocked by Gatekeeper.)

.dmg Universal disk image. Bundled JRE. Download

Windows

Double-click the MSI to install. SmartScreen may warn — click "More info" → "Run anyway".

.msi x64 installer. Bundled JRE. Download

New to Urbit? urbit.org/overview/running-urbit walks you through booting a ship. Once you have the ship's HTTP URL and the +code output, log in inside Talon and you're done.

Source & issues