People search for private chat apps for different reasons. Some mean encryption. Some mean disappearing messages. Some mean talking without strangers, feeds or public profiles. Those are different things, so the useful question is not whether an app uses the word private. It is what the product actually does.
In Drafty, private chat starts with who is allowed into the conversation and what the app keeps afterward.
You choose who can chat with you
Drafty is built around Drafties: people you invite, or people whose invitation you accept. There is no random discovery system and no public audience waiting outside the conversation. Once two people become Drafties, they can Buzz each other and start a one-to-one live Draft.
That makes the social model deliberately smaller than a conventional social network. The goal is not to discover more people. It is to talk to the people you already chose.
Private chat is one-to-one and live
A Draft is a live conversation between two accepted Drafties. One person writes at a time. The other reads the current Draft and replies when it becomes their turn. Each new contribution replaces the one that came before it.
Drafty does not provide a conventional message-history screen, so there is no thread to scroll back through after the conversation. The product is designed around presence rather than accumulation.
Private does not mean anonymous
Drafty is not an anonymous chat app and it is not a random chat service. Drafties are real people connected through deliberate invitations. The disappearing nature of a Draft is about the conversation, not about hiding who the participants are.
Private does not mean impossible to capture
Drafty ends an active Draft when iOS reports a screenshot, screen recording, mirroring or screen sharing event. That is a safety behavior, not a promise that copying is impossible. A screenshot may already exist before iOS reports it, and another person can always use another device to photograph a screen.
If information must never be retained, it should not be placed on a screen. Drafty is designed to avoid keeping a conventional chat history; it cannot control every action another person may take.
What Drafty means by private messaging
For Drafty, private messaging means one-to-one live conversation with people you choose, no random discovery, no public audience, and no conventional chat history to revisit later. That is the privacy model the product is built around.
It is intentionally different from a normal messaging app that stores every message indefinitely. Drafty is for the thought that matters now, with the person it was meant for.
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