What Anonymous Chat Really Means

One New Friend is anonymous chat: you talk with one person a day, on a theme you both see, and neither of you gives a name, a photo or a profile. That is a real thing. It is also a narrower thing than the word “anonymous” suggests on its own.

So this page sets out three things: what the app genuinely never learns about you, what it does hold, and who can read a message after you send it. It is the page we would want to read before trusting any app with a conversation.

What the app never learns about you

This part is not a figure of speech. There is no field anywhere in the app for any of it.

There is no account to create. No email address, phone number, name, username or password exists anywhere in the app, and onboarding is a single button with no text box to fill in. Anonymous chat without an account goes through what that changes in practice, and the privacy policy lists what is stored instead.
There is no profile and no photo. Nothing to fill in, nothing to be judged on, and nothing for the other person to look you up by afterwards.
Neither of you has a real name here. You are not told who you are talking to, because the app never collected it. What you have in common is the day's theme, and how a day works walks through the rest.
There is nothing to match you on but timing. Matching goes by who is online, using your device time zone to look for someone whose waking hours overlap yours. No interests, location or preferences are involved, because none are collected.
Nothing follows you out of the app. The app carries no advertising network, no analytics or crash-reporting SDK and no advertising identifier, and your information is not sold or shared for advertising.

That is the part of the word the app can stand behind: nobody here, us included, knows your name. One New Friend is also not a dating app — nobody is matched for dating or romance.

What anonymous does not mean here

The same word carries four promises One New Friend does not make. Better to read them on this page than to assume them.

Not erased — hidden

After 24 hours an hourly job on the server sets a flag that hides the conversation from both people, so neither of you can open it again. The message text itself stays on the server, where it is kept to investigate safety reports and to improve the service. There is no way to delete it from inside the app today; ask us through the contact page and it is handled by hand.

Not end-to-end encrypted

Traffic between the app and the server is encrypted in transit, which stops someone on the network in between from reading it. It does not put a message beyond our reach. Nothing in the app encrypts a message so that only the two of you can read it, and the privacy policy says plainly that you should not send anything you would be harmed by someone else reading.

Not unlinkable

Your app identity is reused each time you open the app rather than regenerated, so activity in the app can be linked over time to the same device even with no real-world name attached to it. The device id stored alongside it is derived from your device brand, model, OS name and version and year class, plus one random component, then hashed: a device identifier rather than anonymous noise.

Not invisible on your lock screen

With notifications on, a push notification carries the first 50 characters of the message. That excerpt is stored in a queue on the server and travels through Expo and then Apple's or Google's push service to reach your phone, so it leaves the server and can appear on your lock screen. Turning notifications off for One New Friend in your phone's settings stops that.

Each of these is set out in full in the privacy policy, and the 24-hour one also in how it works.

Who can read what you send

The terms of use give three answers, and they are the honest ones: the person you are matched with, us, and anyone you report a message to.

Before a message leaves your phone a filter blocks phone numbers, email addresses and links. The text is then screened by OpenAI's moderation API for harmful content before it is delivered, and the server rejects messages containing certain keywords. No filter is perfect: assume anything you type can be read and remembered by the person reading it.

A report is acted on as soon as it is sent. The conversation ends, the reported person is blocked from you, and someone reported by two or more different people within 90 days is permanently banned. We do not promise that a person reads every report — and keeping message content is part of what lets us look into one when we do. The reporting page explains how.

You can block and leave at any point, with no explanation owed to anyone. The community guidelines set out what the other person is expected to do, and the safety tips cover what to keep to yourself in the first place.

One New Friend is for adults: you must be 18 or older to use the app or this website.

What to check in any anonymous chat app

None of these questions are special to One New Friend. If you are weighing up anonymous chat apps, they are worth asking of every one of them, this one included.

Does it need an account? An app that asks for an email address or a phone number knows who you are, whatever it calls itself.
Does it say deleted, or does it say hidden? Those are different words, and only one of them is a claim about what is left on the server.
Encrypted in transit, or end to end? Both are real things. Only the second puts a message beyond the people running the service.
What happens when you report someone? An app that cannot tell you what a report does is an app that may not do anything with it.
Can you simply leave? Blocking someone and walking out of a conversation should take one tap and need no reason given.
Who else is in the path? Push delivery, moderation and payment providers all handle something. A privacy policy that does not name them is not describing the software.

Our answers to all six are on this page and in the privacy policy, which names every company that receives anything. We would rather you checked than took the word anonymous on trust.

Still want the fine print?

How it works covers a day from open to close, the privacy policy lists what is stored and for how long, the terms of use set out the rules, and anything left over goes through the contact page.