Discrio
When somebody makes you unlock it
Encryption answers the question of who can read a message in transit. It has nothing to say about the moment a person is holding your phone and waiting. That moment is what this is built for.
What actually happens
You choose two passphrases when you set the app up. One opens your conversations. The other opens an app that looks exactly the same, containing different conversations — ordinary ones, the kind anybody has.
Nothing indicates which one you typed. No alarm, no notification, nothing sent anywhere, and not one second of delay between them. Both take the same time to open because both do the same work: the app derives a key from whatever was typed and finds out afterwards which vault it opened.
A third passphrase is optional. Typing it destroys everything on the phone first, irreversibly, and then opens that same quiet app. Nobody watching sees anything except an app opening.
Why the second app has to be real
An empty messenger is not cover. Somebody who made you unlock a phone and found nothing in it knows they found nothing, and the conversation continues from there.
So the second vault is a working app. You can write in it, add contacts, and hold conversations that stay in it. Discrio also fills it with ordinary threads when it is created, and those keep moving forward in time, because a decoy that was last used eight months ago is not a decoy.
The parts most people do not think of
- Getting there without typing. A passphrase takes seconds and is a visible act of hiding something. Holding the contact's name at the top of a conversation crosses to the other side instantly, with no button on screen that could give it away. It goes one way only — coming back needs the passphrase, because a way back would be a way in.
- The storage looks like one thing. Both vaults live in a single encrypted file with decoy records padded to the same sizes, so the file cannot be read as "a real one and a hidden one".
- The settings do not tell. A wipe left the app's preferences behind — which auto-lock you chose, whether watermarks were on — and each one still there said the phone had been configured, so it had been used. Those go with everything else now.
- The decoy has its own everything. Its own identity keys, its own blocked contacts, its own agreed words. Neither vault can see the other's, because each is sealed under the key that opened it.
What this does not do
It does not survive somebody who knows the app. If the person holding your phone knows Discrio has a second passphrase, they know to ask for a second passphrase. Nothing here can fix that, and no honest description of it pretends otherwise. What it defends against is a search that does not know what it is looking for.
It does not protect the other person's phone. Whatever you sent them is on their device, under their control.
It is not a substitute for not having the conversation. The safest message is the one nobody wrote.
Who this is actually for
People who cross borders. People in the middle of a separation where a phone gets looked through. Journalists and their sources. Anyone whose phone may be taken by somebody with the authority or the leverage to make them open it.
If that is not your situation, an ordinary encrypted messenger is the right tool and there are excellent ones — including Signal, which we compare ourselves to honestly.
Is it audited?
No. No independent security audit of Discrio has been published, and until one is, nothing on this page should be treated as an established security property. The source is public under AGPL-3.0 and the cryptography is libsignal, Signal's own library, unmodified and pinned to an exact commit — but that is the cryptography, not this. Anyone whose safety depends on it should know exactly that much.
Questions: support@discrio.com · Discrio on the App Store · Last updated 15 September 2026