Vector Privacy: Q2 2026 Report

A message to the public

Last quarter we wrote that privacy was under attack on every front. A quarter later, none of that pressure has eased.

The same fights are still on the table. Lawmakers across Europe are still pushing "Chat Control" and its successors, proposals that would force messaging apps to scan private conversations before they are encrypted. Governments are still treating end-to-end encryption as a loophole to close rather than a right to defend. And the machinery of everyday surveillance, facial recognition, location tracking, and behavioral profiling, keeps getting cheaper and quieter, baked into more of the apps and public spaces people pass through without noticing.

For the people who feel this first, journalists protecting a source, activists organizing under a hostile government, anyone whose safety depends on not being watched, the question is never theoretical. When a tool gets backdoored or banned, someone real loses their cover.

This is the world Vector was built for, and Q2 was the quarter we widened what it can do.

For most of its life, Vector was about talking to one person at a time. In Q2 we shipped v0.4.0, and with it Vector grew into something larger: fully encrypted Communities, servers with channels, roles, and invites, where the relays carrying your traffic still cannot read a single word. That meant building a new protocol from scratch, embedding Tor directly into the app, and making the whole thing work across every device a person owns. It was the biggest release in Vector's history, and it sets the foundation for everything that comes next.

We did not wait for the world to get safer. We built the tools that help people stay safe inside the one we have.

Q2 2026 at a glance

Features added in Q2 2026

Everything this quarter flowed from one decision. Vector moved off Marmot MDK and onto Concord, a messaging protocol we built from scratch for group spaces running over the open Nostr network. The pivot wiped every existing group chat, including the old official community, which was not a call we made lightly. But it was far better to lay the right foundation now than to bolt fixes onto the wrong one later.

Communities and the Concord Protocol

Network privacy

Accounts and devices

Sharing and personalization

For the full story behind each of these, with screenshots and the reasoning that shaped them, read the v0.4.0 release post.

Release summary

v0.4.0 (May 26, 2026) — 789 downloads

The only release of the quarter, and by a wide margin the largest Vector has ever shipped: three months of development, more than 300 commits, one brand-new protocol, and over a dozen features. Where Q1 delivered three incremental releases, Q2 was a single deliberate leap, the move to Concord and the arrival of Communities, embedded Tor, multi-device and multi-account support, and remote signing. It is the release that turns Vector from a private messenger into a private platform. Choosing to pivot protocols mid-flight cost us in the short term and will pay back for years, and we took the long game.

Download statistics

Q2 2026 by release

Vector reached people through two channels this quarter: the v0.4.0 release on GitHub, and for the first time Zapstore, the Nostr-native app store. Zapstore served 108 Android downloads in all since May 5; v0.4.0 landed there on June 10 and accounts for 38 of them, with the remaining 70 on the prior build.

v0.4.0 platform breakdown

Website and documentation traffic

The Vector documentation site kept growing through the quarter, with one unmistakable peak.

The single highest-traffic day was May 17, with 4,046 events and 2,668 unique visitors, the busiest day in the site's history. It landed squarely in the run-up to the v0.4.0 release, a clear sign that the launch drew people in to read, onboard, and learn before installing.

A smaller bump in mid-April tracked the steady interest between releases, but nothing came close to the launch window. Traffic stayed elevated through the second half of May before easing toward June, the familiar shape of a major release landing and rippling outward.

The overall pattern matched what we saw in Q1, only larger. Interest compounds, and each release reaches more people than the last.

Deep dive: Memory Hardening

Q2 also brought a technical deep dive worth your time. In April we published Memory Hardening: Why Your Keys Shouldn't Survive a Cellebrite Box, a close look at the security work that landed in v0.3.3.

The short version: your encrypted messenger is great at encrypting messages and usually terrible at hiding the keys that do the encrypting. The post walks through how Vector defends against forensic extraction tools, swap-file leaks, and the kind of memory-scanning malware most messengers never think about. If you want to understand what "memory-hardened" actually means in practice, start there.

Looking ahead: v0.5.0

Communities are brand new, so the next stretch is about making them excellent and giving them room to breathe.

Closing

The world did not get friendlier to privacy in Q2 2026. The same legislation is still advancing, the same surveillance is still spreading, and the people who most need to communicate without being watched still face the steepest odds.

Vector pivoted its entire protocol and shipped Communities anyway.

Privacy is a basic human right. We say it because we mean it, and we build from it. Every feature in this report, every line of the new protocol, and every install is one more step toward making that right real for someone who needs it. To everyone who downloaded Vector, filed a bug, joined the new community, or simply believed that a conversation should belong to the people having it: thank you.

The work continues.