Volla Messages

What is Volla Messages and what is it for?

Volla Messages is a private chat app for Android phones and desktop computers. Conversations are held by the devices of the people taking part in them rather than by a single company's data centre, so a chat belongs to the people in it.

Volla Messages comes out of the Volla Cloud, a cloud built by the German phone maker Volla that runs without a data centre, the work of the phones and computers using it instead. Volla names the messages app as one of the first applications for that cloud. Dr. Jörg Wurzer, the founder of Volla Phone, has described the wider goal as a secure and independent communication infrastructure built from distributed, encrypted edge computing.

In use it looks familiar. You add someone with a contact code, start a conversation by sharing an invitation code with one or more people, or open a group that anyone using the app can join with its code. You can send texts, links and photos. What sits underneath is different: each conversation forms its own small network, so the messages in it are held among its participants rather than by a single service.

Volla Messages was shipped with Volla's Quintus smartphone in a beta version, and it also runs on other Android phones and on desktop computers. The repository's README gives the commands for a desktop build, and its releases page offers Android builds in a rich variant, which carries its own Holochain conductor, and a lite variant that uses the conductor provided by the Android Service Runtime app. The repository is where the build notes live.

From 4 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.