# About Phlip started from three observations. 1. Group chats are where plans go to die. The enthusiasm is real, but it scrolls away. 2. Calendar only works if you are organised and have an exact plan. 3. Almost every group's social life is hosted on some company's servers with adverts, subscriptions or data harvesting, when a perfectly good computer is sitting in your pocket (or another collecting dust in storage). Phlip answers all of these at once: an **events-first** app where plans are pitched as cards and locked in with live RSVPs all hosted on **an Android phone you own**. ## Why a phone as the server? Big platforms make you trade ownership for convenience. Self-hosting (Matrix, XMPP) restores ownership but assumes significant technical experience and maintenance. True peer-to-peer fights the operating systems themselves where mobile operating systems kill background connections, and makes "connect to my phone" harder than it sounds. Phlip takes the pragmatic path: **one designated host** on a phone. A phone is always on, has a battery (a built-in UPS), and its owner already knows how to look after it. A recycled spare in a drawer is the purist's setup; your daily phone works too. For friends far away, the app opens a Cloudflare Tunnel - traffic is relayed, but the data lives only on the host. ## The principles 1. **Events first.** Chat exists to support plans, not the other way round. 2. **Own the hardware, own the community.** No company servers holding your group's content. 3. **Open where it counts.** The hosting backend - the server that holds and serves your group's data - is open source under the **Apache License 2.0**, so anyone can read it and audit what it does. The app itself stays proprietary; see [[Notices/Licence]]. 4. **Do one thing well.** Phlip plans events; it doesn't try to be your group's everything. Keep chatting wherever you like. Phlip is for turning talk into plans. 5. **Members need almost nothing.** The app or a browser, a join code, a name, and their own password. 6. **Honesty about boundaries.** What's encrypted, what isn't yet, what's shipped versus planned - stated plainly ([[FAQs]], [[Roadmap]]). 7. **Free means free.** No feature paywalls - supporter purchases are cosmetics only. ## The limitations A phone is a great little server, not a datacenter. What that means in practice: - **It's only up when the phone is.** Wi-Fi wobbles, power cuts, restarts (or the host simply leaving the house with a daily-driver phone) all mean downtime. For a friend group that's usually fine: the server picks up where it left off, and everyone syncs when it's back. - **Android can be possessive.** Phone makers aggressively kill background work to save battery. Phlip hosts through a proper foreground service and holds the locks it needs, but on some phones you may have to exempt it from "battery optimisation" for reliable always-on hosting. - **Batteries dislike living at 100%.** A phone that's permanently plugged in will degrade its battery over time. Mitigations: turn on your phone's charge limit (~80%) if it has one, and keep the device cool and uncovered - Phlip eases Wi-Fi power when nobody's connected to help. - **One phone, one copy.** The host phone is the single store of your group's data - lose it and you lose the servers. Phlip's events-first design softens the blow (the point is what's *next*, not an archive), and server backup / export-import is planned on the [[Roadmap]]. - **Phone-sized, by design.** A phone comfortably serves a friend group, a club or a street - not a community of thousands. - **Public means a relay.** Going public routes traffic through a Cloudflare Tunnel: your group's content lives only on the host, and connection metadata passes through the relay. Encryption is still in development, so the exact boundary is spelled out plainly in the [[FAQs]]. --- **Quicklinks:** [[Why Phlip|Home]] · [[Features]] · [[FAQs]] · [[Notices/Security]] · [[Roadmap]] · [[Notices/Legal]]