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Bramble

Local-first password manager

Details

External ID
48766242
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Bramble
Website domain
github.com
Launched
July 2, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
153
Upvotes percentile
0.948626045400239
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I'm currently working on Bramble, an open source password manager with P2P cross-device sync. Initially I released the Chrome extension, but recently I also published the Android app and iOS is pending Apple's approval. Besides that, the latest version also includes passkey storage for all platforms!About Bramble:It aims to be as feature-rich as all popular and a replacement for cloud-based providers. I don't think we need to store our data in the cloud and be at the whims of companies raising their prices every year. There's always a breach and then we find out that some fields aren't encrypted, metadata is visible, and so on. I'm frustrated with this and the increasing lack of transparency during these breaches.The P2P sync in Bramble uses a Nostr relay (which can be self-hosted) to keep your devices in sync. The relay just introduces the devices to each other; the data then flows directly over WebRTC, so there's no vault server and no cloud copy of your passwords anywhere. What leaves your device is end-to-end encrypted and your devices authenticate each other directly, so a snooping or MITM relay gets practically nothing.Crypto is all done in Rust so I can control exactly how key material lives and dies in memory (secrets get zeroed out, no GB leaving copies lying around). In Chromium it's a wasm module, on mobile it's native builds bridged over via uniffi.Android app:I'm still deciding whether to publish the app on Play store or simply provide the signed APK which users can sideload. Reason for that is Google's plan to lock down Android and take away ownership from its users. Read more about it here: https://keepandroidopen.com/The app uses no Play APIs whatsoever and runs perfectly on GrapheneOS, where I actually did all my testing.Questions, feedback, feature requests - all welcome!TL;DR: I dislike private-equity and venture funded companies messing with our security, so I created my own Password Manager which is local-first, free, open source and as transparent as it gets.

Enrichment

Theme
self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
Vertical
Security
Function
Dev tools
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
local-first password manager
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No A password manager handling passkeys, cross-platform autofill on iOS and Android, and serverless P2P synchronization requires zero-knowledge cryptographic primitives, secure enclave integration, and OS-level platform credential provider implementations where minor bugs lead to catastrophic security vulnerabilities.

What it would actually take: The stack requires a shared cryptographic core (likely in Rust using XChaCha20-Poly1305, Argon2id, and WebCrypto) integrated across platform-specific Credential Provider extensions (Android Autofill Framework, Apple AuthenticationServices). The peer-to-peer sync necessitates WebRTC/libp2p discovery with end-to-end authenticated key exchange (like SPAKE2+ or Noise Protocol), passkey FIDO2/WebAuthn attestation handling, and strict platform security audits.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: KeePass/KeePassXC/KeePassDX, Bitwarden, MEGA sync

Concerns raised: Data loss risk without central server backup, Browser compromise exposes cleartext passwords, P2P sync security trade-offs with private key replication, Lack of easy disaster recovery for multiple lost devices, User confusion about backup storage and syncing requirements

Feature requests: Better browser autofill matching with regex support, Disaster recovery and encrypted export functionality, Screenshots or documentation, Merge conflict handling documentation, More cryptocurrency payment options beyond Monero

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 122 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #5 of 123 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 245 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.