We’re getting behind the Udal Project
A computer that belongs to you again.
For years the deal has run one way — accept the terms or stay out, hand over your data or the app won’t open. Every tap watched, every habit logged, all of it pooled into a handful of companies. Udal is the turn back toward balance: the power sits with the person at the keyboard, not the company on the other side of the screen. That’s why we’re getting behind it — and why we think you will too.
It’s a single, extensible ecosystem — apps, games, browsing, communications and productivity — all opt-in, all in one place. A rich tapestry of tools that do what commercial software does, without the commercial terms. You choose what to install, what to connect, and what stays offline — and it all runs on your machine, encrypting what it keeps there. The cloud is treated as what it is: someone else’s computer, assumed unsafe unless it’s yours or you’ve encrypted your data first. It reaches out only when you decide it should. The system itself is free — free as in freedom, free as in use. Third-party makers may one day sell their own apps on it, but Udal the platform costs nothing and never will; if it earns a place in your day, you can buy the makers a coffee.
Everything lives inside one familiar, browser-style window — so it travels with you and nothing new has to be learned. That is the whole aim: power at the edges, held by the people using it, rather than gathered at a centre that rents it back to them.
It’s early days — here’s what Udal is, why it’s built this way, and how to be there when it lands.
We back this project — the same way we back Linux and GrapheneOS.
We like Udal for the same reason we like living privately: it’s built on the belief that fairness and control belong with the person, not the company. It’s proof the alternative isn’t just an idea — that you can have a rich, capable digital life without handing yourself over to get it. Udal is emerging, and it’s the kind of thing we’re here to see flourish.
Fair by design, not by policy.
The modern deal is “agree or you can’t play” — terms bundled into the requirements, weighted against you, with no real alternative. Udal is the counterpoint: no account, no telemetry, no server — so there are no terms to hold over you, because there’s nothing to hold, and nobody can change the deal later because there is no centre where the deal is kept. Online democracy instead of a technical oligarchy.
Why it is shaped this way.
The ordinary model pays for itself by watching people and concentrating what it learns into a few companies. The convenience is real, and the bill is quietly settled with whatever can be found out about you.
Udal starts from the opposite assumption. It is arranged so there is nothing to watch and nowhere to put it — not a promise that could be revised next quarter, but an architecture with no server to hold it on. You are not private because a setting says so; you are private because nothing was built that could expose you.
Everything else on this page follows from that one choice — how you reach other people, how your identity works, what the cloud is ever trusted with. None of it is bolted on afterwards; it is what is left once the surveillance is taken out.
The way things are now isn’t the only way they’ve ever been. The early internet had a more open feel, and over the years there were other kinds of network too — most of which have quietly faded away since. Bit by bit, the space we once simply used became something closer to airtime and storage, rented back to us month by month. Udal’s tunnel mode leans gently toward that older, more open feel — not as a protest, and without pretending the past was perfect. Just carrying forward the simple idea that a connection can belong to the people using it.
Udal brings together five things that have always been sold separately: a rich first-party application suite, private web browsing, peer-to-peer relayed communication, games — and room to extend it later with signed third-party plugins, free or commercial. Nothing has been built that puts all five in one place, under one identity, on a machine that answers to its owner — and keeps that machine safe while it does.
The Udal Project Principles
Nine principles — and what each means for you. The short version: power that can't centralise, not power that merely promises not to.
The part that's entirely your choice.
Two decisions, and both are yours — with nothing locked in, because you can change your mind at any time. Every app runs exactly the same whichever way you choose; all that changes is the network around it.
On a network, or not?
No network
App-onlyThe machine has no way out, and no way in. Every app still runs — the footprint drops to almost nothing. Nothing to intercept, nothing to leak.
On a network
ConnectedThe machine gets a way onto the world. If you choose this, there's a second choice — which network you're on.
If you're on a network — which one?
ClearNet
The ordinary web, cleaned up. Ads, trackers and the scripts that follow you between sites are dropped before they load, so pages are lighter and quicker.
For daily browsing — search, email, video, everything.
The Tunnel
World firstA private encrypted network addressed by key rather than by address, carrying messaging, sharing and two-player games — and it needs no third-party infrastructure at all. The people are the network. Nothing is rented, nothing is registered, and there is no company in the middle to ask.
Use either or both. Your everyday browsing does not need Tunnel.
Either, both, or neither — your call. Every app runs the same in all of them; what changes is the network around them, never the suite. Most software never offers the choice at all — only the ordinary web, and only on its terms.
Your identity, and why nobody can see it
There is no sign-up — no email, no username, nothing held on anyone's server. Your machine makes a key, writes down twenty-four words, and that is your identity.
It is invisible. There is no directory, no search, no suggestions: nobody can look you up, and you cannot look anybody up either. To connect, two people swap the public half of their keys — a meaningless-looking string — and both have to accept, inside a short window. One side agreeing does nothing.
After that, the two machines work out a shared key between themselves that is never sent anywhere and that only those two can produce — so there is no server in the middle and nothing to intercept. Remove somebody and it all goes: the connection, the key, and what was shared over it.
And even once you're connected, nothing is open by default. Every way you interact with someone — or anything you share — is permissioned off until you switch it on, one choice at a time. Hand a document over view-only, just once; let someone co-edit it a single time, or keep it open to them on an on-going basis; a game of chess now and again; always up for a chat over TalkVault — whatever you wish. Each connection is exactly as much, or as little, as you decide.
You are the one who invites, who grants each permission, and who can revoke any of it — a single share, one person’s access, or everything at once — the moment you change your mind. Appear offline to one particular person, dial a permission back, or pull the whole connection in a tap. It is your machine, your key, your call — you are always the one in control.
You are reachable by the people you handed a key to, and by nobody else.
Tunnel Identity
Privacy follows from the construction: every data store is encrypted with AES-256-GCM and Argon2id. The optional Tunnel Identity carries a 24-word recovery phrase, multi-device linking, and a kill-switch to lock a device you've lost.
Not Chromium. Not a Firefox fork. No Electron.
Udal is built on an independent engine — Rust and GTK4 rendering with WebKit. That matters beyond speed: a third engine is one fewer part of the web decided by a single company.
The whole suite lives inside a browser-style window on purpose: it is the one interface nearly everyone already knows, and it travels — the same familiar shell on any machine you sit down at. But the engine underneath is a third choice, outside the Chromium-and-Firefox duopoly, so one more part of how the web works isn’t decided by a single company. Around sixty applications today, a good third of them games, with private browsing as one component rather than the headline; the suite grows with each release.
What comes with it
The suite is still growing and changing, so what matters is the kinds of thing it covers rather than a fixed list of names.
Productivity
Office and workspace — mail, tasks, calendar and address book — plus PDF, notes and bookkeeping.
Tools
The platform components that hold it all together, alongside the everyday utilities people reach for.
Web apps
Sites you use every day, installed and launched as apps in their own right.
Education
Learning across the school subjects, from early years upward.
Authoring
Writing and publishing surfaces for putting your work out into the world.
Design
Colour, graphics, image editing and layout — the visual side of making things.
Dev & Data
Encoding, web development, maths, electronics tools and the data utilities underneath.
Music & Audio
Capture, library, playback, phone sync and everything that makes a sound.
Photo & Video
Camera, gallery, editing and the visual media tools that go with them.
Security
Two-factor codes and the encrypted vault that keeps your keys and secrets safe.
Tunnel Tools
Mail, calls, sharing, remote desktop and broadcasting — direct between people, with nothing in the middle.
Games
A hub of games, from classics to puzzles. Several play one-on-one over the Tunnel, with nothing between the two players.
The Tunnel side is the youngest part and where most of the new work goes. Broadcaster (publishing out to people who follow you), Tunnel VPN (carrying ordinary traffic over the mesh), Remote Desktop (reaching your own machines) are planned, and TalkVault is still being built out. Third-party plugins will come later — signed and checked, sitting alongside the suite rather than woven into it. The App Roadmap in Settings shows where each one has got to — and says plainly what has not been built yet rather than implying it exists.
First-party apps, and room for more.
The apps that ship with Udal are its first-party suite. Each one is signed off by Udal and built into the ecosystem — sharing the same vault, the same identity and the same seams, so they work together as one rather than as a pile of separate programs.
Third-party apps are a different thing, and not something on offer right now. When they do come, they will sit more like a plugin than a first-party app: still signed and checked, but not woven into Udal’s internal ecosystem and not crossing the seams the built-in apps share. They add to Udal without becoming part of it.
Their makers set their own terms, too. Some of these first-release third-party apps may be commercial, others free — a simple screensaver, say — but that is the maker’s choice, not Udal’s. Udal itself is always free.
The idea of one trusted place to get software is borrowed from desktop Linux. There, software does not come from random websites — you open one trusted software centre and choose from tens of thousands of audited packages, up to around 50,000 on Linux, all in one place and all checked. Udal follows the same principle: nothing sideloaded from a corner of the internet you just have to hope is safe.
That is part of how Udal keeps your system safe. Everything is signed and screened before it lands, so adding something new can never quietly cost you your machine or your data.
First-party
signed off by Udal and built into the ecosystem
Third-party
signed plugins — free or commercial, maker’s choice; not yet available
No random sites
the model borrowed from Linux — nothing you just hope is safe
Games (25)
Several playable against someone else over the Tunnel, with no server between you.
Free, and built to stay free.
No price tag, no subscription, no premium tier, no ads, and nothing about you sold to keep the lights on. The system itself is free — free as in freedom, and free as in use. If it earns a place in your day, you can buy the makers a coffee. No pressure, ever.
Because there is no server to rent and no company in the middle, there is very little to pay for in the first place, and no built-in reason to ever start charging you with your attention or your data. Independent makers may one day offer their own third-party apps — some free, some commercial, on their own terms — but Udal itself is, and stays, free.
That is the whole of it — nothing hidden, nothing to sign away, nothing to lose. All that’s left is to be there when it arrives.
Be there at the start.
Udal is a computer that belongs to you again.
Everything else is detail. Online or not. ClearNet or direct-to-people. Sixty-odd apps that will keep changing. Leave your email and we'll tell you the moment it goes live.