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Ratspeak

Ratspeak is the desktop and mobile client for the Reticulum mesh — a native app for sending end-to-end encrypted messages, placing experimental peer-to-peer voice calls, watching peers come and go, configuring your radio interfaces, and playing the occasional game with someone three hops away.

It's the same app on every platform: macOS, Linux, Windows, iOS, Android. The protocol stack underneath is identical regardless of where you run it, so a Ratspeak user on a laptop, a Ratdeck handheld on LoRa, and someone running Sideband on their phone can all talk to each other.

Platforms​

Ratspeak is built as a single Tauri v2 app from one Rust codebase. Desktop packaging targets .dmg for macOS, amd64/arm64 .deb plus amd64 .rpm / .AppImage for Linux, and MSI / NSIS for Windows. Mobile uses the same crate with platform-conditional dependencies — Android via JNI, iOS via Objective-C bindings. Desktop supports USB serial radios, BLE radios, and RNode TCP bridges; Android supports USB host, BLE, and RNode TCP; iOS supports BLE and RNode TCP for radios because Apple does not expose USB serial to third-party apps.

Get the app​

Ratspeak v1.0.20 is the current public release, published as a normal GitHub release rather than a prerelease. Download desktop and Android artifacts from ratspeak.org/download.html or the Ratspeak GitHub releases page. Source is AGPL-3.0-or-later at github.com/ratspeak/Ratspeak.

If you'd rather build from source, see Building from Source. Ratspeak must be checked out next to rsReticulum, rsLXMF, lrgp-rs, and (for the default build, which includes experimental voice calls) rsLXST so Cargo can resolve the local development crates.

Inside the app​

The app has seven primary views plus first-run Setup. Desktop exposes Home, Messages, Games, Peers, Network, and Settings in the sidebar. Mobile uses Peers, Messages, Contacts, and a More sheet for secondary views.

  • Home — your at-a-glance dashboard. Recent messages, network health, quick actions.
  • Messages — LXMF conversations. Threads, attachments, images, search, replies, reactions, and delivery state per message. The conversation header also exposes the experimental voice-call button when both sides are reachable on a single Reticulum hop.
  • Peers — everyone the network has heard about. Tap one to start a conversation or save them as a contact.
  • Contacts — your saved address book, with avatars rendered from each identity's hash.
  • Network — interfaces, transport stats, Offline Inbox nodes, and Bluetooth Peer. This is where you add a TCP gateway, plug in an RNode, choose store-and-forward inbox behavior, or troubleshoot why a hop isn't resolving.
  • Settings — identity management, PIN protection, export/import, auto-announce interval, network policy, Bluetooth Peer toggle, theme.
  • Games — multiplayer Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe over LXMF, using the LRGP gaming protocol. Sessions ride as fields on normal LXMF messages, so any LRGP-aware client can join.
  • Setup — first-run identity creation, 12-word recovery phrase backup, and restore/import. You won't see this view again unless you factory-reset.

There is no embedded HTTP server. The frontend is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS loaded over Tauri's asset protocol; the WebView talks to the Rust core through Tauri IPC commands and events.

Voice calls (experimental)​

Ratspeak ships an experimental voice surface built on rsLXST, the Rust Reticulum-LXST telephony stack. Calls run over a normal Reticulum link directly between the two devices — no relay servers, no SFU, no media gateway. Audio uses Opus and starts at the Medium Quality profile; the underlying rsLXST profile matrix supports Medium, High, Super High, Low Latency, and Ultra Low Latency.

The call button lives in the conversation header on the Messages view, and only appears when the other side is an active LXMF contact, no other call is in progress, and the voice stack is built into the binary. Tap to dial, tap again to hang up. Incoming calls open a global call strip across the top of the app plus an answer/reject sheet on mobile; both surfaces are navigable back to the matching conversation. Outgoing rings give up automatically after about 25 seconds with no answer.

The app enforces a few privacy and abuse rules independently of the protocol:

  • Contacts, or direct neighbors only. Inbound calls are allowed if the caller is in your contacts, or if Reticulum can reach them on a direct (zero-hop) path — typically a peer on the same LAN, BLE link, or other local interface. Calls from non-contacts that would require routing through a transport node are dropped before any audio path opens, and the caller receives a polite "only accepting calls from contacts" notice over LXMF.
  • Blocked contacts are blackholed. A call from a contact you have blocked is rejected and the caller is added to the network blackhole list so further attempts are dropped at the transport layer.
  • Auto-blackhole on persistent rejection. A non-contact whose calls have been rejected ten times in a row is automatically blackholed for rate-limit reasons, so the device stops ringing on their behalf even if they keep dialing.
  • Network blackhole short-circuit. Identities already on the network blackhole list cannot ring the device at all; the call is dropped before policy evaluation.

Microphone and speaker access goes through each OS's normal permission model — RECORD_AUDIO plus MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS on Android, NSMicrophoneUsageDescription on macOS/iOS, the system default device on Linux/Windows. The first time you place or answer a call the OS prompts; later calls reuse the granted permission.

Voice is intentionally narrow: there is no voicemail, no group call, no call recording, no echo cancellation or noise suppression beyond what the OS audio stack provides, and no LXMF-routed offline-call fallback. Treat the surface as a beta — codec quality, call setup, ringtones, and platform audio routing are subject to change while rsLXST stabilizes.

The lxst-voice Cargo feature gates the entire voice stack and is on by default. If you build Ratspeak from source without the rsLXST sibling checkout, pass --no-default-features to cargo tauri dev or cargo tauri build to skip voice entirely.

Where your data lives​

Ratspeak stores app state under .ratspeak/ in the OS data directory (~/Library/Application Support/org.ratspeak.desktop/.ratspeak/ on macOS, ~/.local/share/org.ratspeak.desktop/.ratspeak/ on Linux, %APPDATA%\org.ratspeak.desktop\.ratspeak\ on Windows). Reticulum interface config defaults to .ratspeak/reticulum/config unless RATSPEAK_RNS_CONFIG_DIR points somewhere else.

  • ratspeak.db — SQLite database for messages, contacts, conversations, and settings. WAL mode, single file, safe to back up while the app is closed.
  • identities/<hash>/identity — unprotected software private-key material. The file is 64 bytes: a 32-byte X25519 private key concatenated with a 32-byte Ed25519 seed.
  • identities/<hash>/identity.enc — PIN-encrypted software private-key material, used when you lock an identity at rest.
  • identities/<hash>/identity.seed — recovery-phrase sidecar for unprotected recoverable software identities. Once you set a PIN, the phrase is encrypted in the same vault as the key.
  • identities/<hash>/identity.hwid — hardware-key metadata for a YubiKey-backed identity. The private key itself stays on the token and cannot be exported.
  • reticulum/config — the app-private Reticulum interface config. Its shared-instance ports default to 37430/37431 so Ratspeak can coexist with system Reticulum tools using 37428/37429.

If you copy the .ratspeak/ directory to another machine and launch Ratspeak there, you keep your identity, conversation history, and app-private Reticulum interface setup. If you only need the identity, new software identities can be restored from a 12-word phrase or imported from a PIN-encrypted .rsi backup; raw Reticulum exports and Base32 keys are available for compatibility but are unencrypted private-key material.

Hardware it talks to​

Ratspeak speaks to anything that speaks Reticulum. Out of the box that means Ratdeck and rsCardputer handhelds on any reachable Reticulum path, RNode-class boards over USB, BLE, or RNode TCP, and other Ratspeak / Sideband / NomadNet / MeshChat clients reachable over TCP, UDP, I2P, or Bluetooth Peer. iOS cannot use USB serial radios, but it can use BLE RNode hardware or an RNode TCP bridge.

What it isn't​

Ratspeak isn't a web app — there's no server you can point a browser at. It's a native binary that bundles a WebView and talks to the Rust core directly.

Desktop hardware-key identities use Ratkey with YubiKey/PIV: the private key lives on the token, unlock is PIN-gated once per session, and recoverable setup can produce a 12-word phrase backup. This path is desktop-only and still experimental. Notarized macOS, code-signed Windows, and public mobile store distribution are still in progress, so builds may need to be allowed through your OS's gatekeeper.