Terminal Phone
E2EE Walkie Talkie from the Command Line
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TerminalPhone is a single, self-contained Bash script that provides anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice and text communication between two parties over the Tor network. It operates as a walkie-talkie: you record a voice message, and it is compressed, encrypted, and transmitted to the remote party as a single unit. You can also send encrypted text messages during a call. No server infrastructure, no accounts, no phone numbers. Your Tor hidden service .onion address is your identity.
HN · launched Feb 26, 2026 · 322 upvotes (top 2%) · 0 views
Niche: private and secure messaging apps · 144 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -41% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Communication
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 144 launches in private and secure messaging apps →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a Bash script wrapping readily available command-line utilities including Tor hidden services, SoX for audio, and GPG/OpenSSL for encryption.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: letscage (Rust-based similar design), Firefox Send / ffsend (file sharing), Tor (for anonymity/privacy comparisons)
Concerns raised: Lacks post-quantum cryptography, Latency issues from Tor routing, Tor blocked/perceived as nefarious in enterprise/controlled networks, Not real-time capability, Anonymity vs speed tradeoff unclear
Feature requests: Configurable single-hop Tor mode for speed (sacrificing anonymity), Sub-6kbps audio encoding (2kbps if possible), Playable speed adjustment on receive side to reduce latency, Opus DRED error correction scheme integration for robustness, Authorized Tor client key export functionality
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 275 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #14 of 276 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 104 days after the earliest competitor.
- terminal-phone · github · 2026-11-03 · 134 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Simple Terminal Voice Recorder · hn · 2026-03-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Tacitum · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- The Line · ph · 2026-11-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- X2Chat · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- rawgram · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Walkie · ph · 2026-09-22 · 76 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Remote Terminal · ph · 2026-09-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.