Hotline Navigator

Why this exists

Hotline Navigator is a new client that lets you connect to that still-living network from any device you own. It’s a spiritual port of Dustin Mierau’s excellent Hotline for macOS, rebuilt from scratch with Tauri, TypeScript, React, and Rust to run natively on desktop and mobile.

Runs everywhere

One codebase. Six platforms. Native performance on all of them. Cross-platform doesn't have to be a compromise.

• macOS 11.0+, Universal
• Windows x86_64
• Linux x86_64, ARM64
• iOS 18.7+
• iPadOS 18.7+
• Android 7.0+

What the hell is Hotline?

Hotline was a Mac-native BBS for the internet era, created by a teenage Australian programmer in the mid-1990s. It let anyone spin up their own private file-sharing server with chat, news posts, and user accounts—like Discord crossed with a file server, years before either concept existed. It exploded in popularity, then imploded in lawsuits and drama—but the network itself never actually died.

Features and Philosophy

Full Hotline protocol support: chat, file transfers, news boards, and messaging, in a multi-session, single-window interface designed to work at any screen size. It also includes modern features like TLS encryption support (with auto detection), ability to preview files without downloading, chat mentions/watch words, notificaitons and more. We've come a long ways since Electron Tauri uses the operating system's native WebView for the UI and a backend/application core, and is compiled to a native binary for each platform, even though it uses TypeScript and React for the UI. This means it's it's lean: a single binary for each platform is about 15 MB uncompressed (macOS is 30 MB~ as it's a universal binary). It's also isn't a RAM hog, RAM usage is often around 50-60 MB. It's also very fast and responsive, and will idle basically near zero.

Hotline Navigator's aim isn't to provide the most native experience on each platform, but to provide the a consistent experience and rich feature set across all platforms. I highly recommend users testing out multiple clients to find the one that works best for them, see the Hotline Wiki for a list of clients.

Also, personally speaking, I'm pretty elastic on the concept of software preservation. Hotline Navigator will always be backwards compatible with the Hotline protocol, but aims to support more modern features and improvements as they become available through collaboration with the Hotline community. This may mean extended protocol support that not be compatible with older clients, but that's the nature of software evolution. Hopefully with modern features and improvements, the Hotline network will offer a more vibrant and engaging experience for users.

This is client software only. Want to run your own Hotline server? Mobius is a modern, open-source server that works with all Hotline clients, and MobiusAdmin gives you a native macOS GUI to manage it.

Privacy Focused

Hotline Navigator does not collect, store, transmit, or sell any personal data. Period.

Get it

Grab the latest release from GitHub. Desktop builds install normally; mobile builds require sideloading.