see also Technical FAQ

Tox is by no means complete. You may encounter bugs ranging from simple visual defects to segfaults on file shares. We cannot guarantee what works today will work tomorrow; Tox is an alpha program and code changes daily. Certain commits may break existing APIs, and we strive to give proper advanced warning to all client developers, etc. when such changes will be made. Additionally, Tox has not yet received a full security audit. While we believe Tox is secure against attackers who want to decrypt your messages, you may wish to use a more established solution if you are in a life-or-death situation.

Tox is a free (as in liberty and price) peer to peer, distributed, multimedia messenger.

Using existing technologies such as dispersed networking and strong cryptography, Tox can provide a superior instant messaging experience than current market offerings. Files can be shared as fast as you and your partner's Internet connection allows, audio calls are instantaneous, and there are no arbitrary limits to how many people you can have in a group conversation.

Tox's goal is to get secure messaging in the hands of everyone because we feel it's necessary in a world where our privacy is often overlooked; which means our efforts are free of charge with absolutely no strings attached. There are no advertisements; you are not the product and absolutely no data is collected from our users. We are here for altruistic purposes, which is why we rely on the community to help us make Tox better.

It's not done yet, but we're open source, so you can try out our current working version at any time! Remember that it is very likely Tox will have bugs or missing features. Please read the warning ​the top of this page before you begin.

If you just want a prebuilt version to play around with, see Binaries.

If you want to contribute to Tox, or prefer to compile your own, check out Source.

Tox protects your privacy by removing the need to rely on central authorities to provide messenger services, concealing your identity(In the form of meta-data, your IP address) from people who are not your authorized friends, enforcing Off-The-Record Messaging as the default and only mode of operation for all messages, and by making your identity impossible to forge without stealing your personal private key on your own computer.

Look in the profile or settings panel of your client to get your Tox ID which should look something like: 56A1ADE4B65B86BCD51CC73E2CD4E542179F47959FE3E0E21B4B0ACDADE51855D34D34D37CB5

Give yours to your friend and get your friend to add it. That's it.

If you want a shorter more memorable ID, be sure to read and understand the warning.

There are various possibilities like ToxDNS which make the contact easier - unfortunately at the unavoidable price of security. Even if you decide to trust the service owner, you still access highly unreliable data supplied by third parties. You may call a contact via a name service and recognize his/her face on the screen but you will not know whether someone else is participating in the conversation behind the scenes. In other words, you wave the confidentiality which Tox otherwise offers.

The same applies to sharing/getting the Tox IDs via mail or web pages (https is somewhat better). If you want to embed a link to your Tox ID on a web page or in your email signature, check out Tox: URIs. Go here for more general information on sharing ID's.

If you remove someone, they will see you go offline, as if you closed client normally. They can't communicate with you any longer until you add them to your friend list again.

Currently Tox does not support plugins, though this feature may be added later on.

Tox makes no attempt to cloak your IP address when communicating with other users, as the whole point of peer-to-peer is to connect you directly to your friends. A workaround does exist in the form of tunneling your Tox connections through Tor. However, a user cannot uncover another user's IP address using only a Tox ID to find the user in the DHT, the IP address will only be discernible when the users become “friends.” 1

See Also: What is stopping people from tracking me through the public DHT.

Tox is continuously developed, and at the moment not all features are in place. Here are answers to some of questions

Support for multiple devices is planned. A simple explanation of the issues involved is here. More info about possible ways it could be implemented here.

Yes, you can. Note though that it should be kept synced by you across devices, and running more than 1 Tox instance at the same time using same profile will lead to bad things™ happening. Nothing critical, but you would experience severe disruptions using Tox, like friends constantly going offline / online, file transfers not working, etc.

Import / Export

Persistent groupchats are being developed as part of the groupchat overhaul which is being undertaken primarily by Jfreegman. The work is nearing completion and the github branch can be found here.

Offline messages are planned. For an explanation of the issues involved in Offline Messaging, go here. For ideas about how it will be implemented go here. GSoC 2015 Offline Messaging

Yep. There is still missing a proper design of interface for it, so if you think that you could contribute one, please do so

For more information about compiling Tox from source, see the Technical FAQ

For more information on the communicating with the Tox community, see community.

For information on troubleshooting known issues in Tox, see troubleshooting.

As an open source project, Tox needs developers first and foremost. Graphic designers are very welcome too. Adventurous users can test and report bugs, translators will be necessary later on to translate stuff, and this wiki could always use another pair of hands! For more information on contributing to Tox, see contributing.