Introducing TapChat: Mobile IRC done right. Stay connected with your favorite channels without draining your phone’s battery. Scroll back to catch up on what you’ve missed, and receive push notifications when someone mentions or messages you.

IRC might be over two decades old, but it’s still used by people around the world every day to chat with friends and collaborate on projects. Newer group chat products like HipChat and Campfire are designed for teams within companies rather than for more casual groups or open-source projects. Developers continue to create IRC channels for new open-source projects every day.

The IRC protocol hasn’t really changed since its inception 20 years ago and is not very mobile friendly. If you stay connected all the time you’ll quickly drain your battery, but if you disconnect you’ll miss out on important discussions.

Many people work around this problem by leaving a terminal-based IRC client such as Irssi always running on a server somewhere, but SSHing from a phone is no fun. “Bouncers”, such as ZNC, which sit in between a standard IRC client and the IRC server are another common solution, but they have many limitations such as not being able to sync private conversations across all of your devices.

Unlike most mobile IRC apps, TapChat has two components:

1. The TapChat Server, a small headless app that you run somewhere in the cloud which translates the archaic IRC protocol into a modern mobile-optimized stream and also fires off push notifications when someone wants your attention.

2. TapChat for Android, a fast and elegant chat app that’s always in sync across all your devices and doesn’t use any resources when not on screen.

If you’d rather not run your own TapChat server, the Android app is also compatible with IRCCloud, an excellent browser-based IRC client-as-a-service.

I wrote TapChat because it’s the app I’ve always wanted, and I’ve already heard from IRC users around the world that it’s the app they’ve been waiting for. I’m confident you’ll love it too.

Learn more at tapchatapp.com.