Company

The privacy policy and the terms say Rift is operated by Rift Communications LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, and that this company is the data controller. The French footer on therift.chat prints the same name under "© 2026."

The filing

OpenCorporates' free page for that filing ID shows the agent and the Gould Street address. It does not show a formation day without a login, and it does not show member names. Wyoming LLC filings do not list members. The organizer, if you open the Parties panel on the Secretary of State's site, is who filed the paperwork. This page does not have that name from a fetched Parties panel. The free public fields stop at the agent.

30 N Gould Street in Sheridan is the building used by Registered Agents Inc and by other commercial registered agents. Local reporting describes it as the listed address for a very large share of Wyoming LLCs: ordinary companies that want a Wyoming agent, and also, in cases the Sheridan press has written up, businesses that were not what the website claimed. Hiring a registered agent there is legal. It is also the entire physical footprint Rift has published. "There is no upstairs" is, on the filing, a mail drop labeled Suite R on one form and PMB R on another.

The about page says there are no investors and no board. The free record cannot confirm that, and it cannot contradict it. Absence of members from a Wyoming LLC extract is how the form works. The terms allow the company to assign the contract if it is sold.

The contract

Terms of Service, last updated September 2026. Governing law is Wyoming, without conflict-of-law rules. Disputes that are not arbitrated go to state or federal courts in Wyoming, unless a mandatory consumer protection in your country says otherwise.

For users in the United States, most disputes go to individual arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act. There is a class-action waiver and a jury-trial waiver. You can opt out of the arbitration agreement within 30 days of first accepting the terms, by email, with your username. The class waiver, "to the extent the law allows," still applies if you opt out. Small-claims court and IP injunctions are carved out. If 50 or more similar demands are filed with the same lawyers, they can be batched. Rift pays the filing and arbitrator fees for an individual claim of $10,000 or less brought in good faith, unless the arbitrator calls it frivolous. You are supposed to email them and wait 45 days before filing.

Liability: no indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, and no damages for lost profits, data, or goodwill, to the extent the law allows. The aggregate cap is what you paid in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred U.S. dollars if you have not paid. You indemnify Rift for your content, your use, and your violations of the terms. The service is "as is" and "as available." They can change, suspend, or discontinue features. Subscriptions renew until you cancel, and they do not refund a partial period except where the law requires it.

You may not reverse engineer, decompile, scrape, or run a modified client. You may not sell or share your account or your Rift Key. Lose the password and the Rift Key, and the account cannot be recovered. They are explicit that this is the privacy architecture: they never receive the key, so they cannot reset it. The homepage makes the same fact into a joke ("Lost that? Really sucks.").

Feedback you send them, they may use for any purpose with no duty to pay you. Your content stays yours, and you grant a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, display, and transmit it as needed to run the service, including format conversion, EXIF stripping, thumbnails, and transcoding. The terms say they do not train models on it.

Canary and transparency

Warrant canary, last updated 26 August 2026. As of that date they state: no National Security Letters, no secret court orders they are forbidden to disclose in full, no gag that stops them from saying so, and no backdoor or knowingly compromised cryptography at anyone's direction. The next update is due by 31 January 2027. If the date passes with no update, they tell you to treat the page as stale.

They used to update every three months. In August 2026 they moved to six, and they wrote down why: the statements were still true, they had received no request of any kind, and a canary whose schedule changes in silence is a canary you should not trust. Publishing the change is the right way to change a canary. Stretching it is still a stretch. A young service with a zero history picked a slower clock.

Transparency report, first one, "open beta through July 12, 2026," page dated 12 July 2026:

• Government and law enforcement requests: 0 received, 0 complied with.
• National security requests: 0.
• Legally compelled removals or restrictions: 0.
• DMCA notices processed: 0.

They say the report is about what the law makes them do, not day-to-day moderation, and that a page of zeros is the baseline that would make a later change visible. The next report covers the period through 31 December 2026 and is due by 31 January 2027, on the same day as the next canary. Between 12 July and 3 October, no second report was on that page.

DMCA page

The DMCA page, last updated April 2026, explains notices and counter-notices and says notices go to a designated copyright contact. The contact block in the page fetched on 3 October 2026 is an email address. It does not name a person. It does not print a postal address. The Play listing, separately, prints the Sheridan PMB and a phone number. A DMCA designated agent registered with the U.S. Copyright Office is supposed to be findable under the statute. This site did not confirm or deny a Copyright Office registration. The page Rift shows the public is an email.

What you can install

Download page, fetched 3 October 2026:

• Windows and macOS desktop builds are linked from the page.
• Linux package links are filled in by a script from a release manifest (linux-x86_64-deb and the other platform keys).
• Android is on Google Play, package chat.rift.mobile, and is also offered as a direct APK under "Rather not use Google Play?": Beta 0.9.79, 124 MB, Android 7+. The instructions say to allow installs from that source, and if Play Protect warns because the file did not come from the Play Store, choose "Install anyway." They publish a SHA-256 for that file: cd5d8345c5ce512e51e8c203a87e5cf6b3b73f5306e0a50c693ec8bb463c1cec. If you already sideloaded, uninstall before switching to Play.
• iOS: "built and in beta while App Store submission finishes," and, lower on the page, details appear "once submission is underway." Status line: "Built, in beta, awaiting App Store."

On 24 July 2026, u/TheRiftChat told Reddit the Play listing was "a few weeks" out and that an APK was already on the download page. The store listing exists now. The sideload is still there, for a closed-source client, next to a terms section that forbids modified clients. The official APK is theirs, and the download page prints a SHA-256 so you can check the file you received against the file they meant to publish. That hash does not tell you the APK matches the Play build, and it does not tell you what the program does.

The vs-Discord page says the Windows chat UI runs in WebView2. A native shell around a Chromium webview is a normal way to ship. It is also the client the encryption page says you have to trust fresh, every time the code changes.

Who writes "we" · Filing and listing links