Galosha is a mobile-first messaging platform built for families separated by borders — and for people who are not technical enough to configure a VPN.
Millions of Russian-speaking families live across different countries. But ISPs in some regions use deep-packet inspection to throttle or block WhatsApp, Telegram, and standard VoIP protocols. Calls drop. Messages arrive hours late.
Galosha runs on Android, iOS, and Desktop. Registration needs only a phone number and a display name — no email, no ID.
Full-featured app with voice and video calls, group messaging, voice notes, images, and contacts — with push notifications when the app is in the background.
Native SwiftUI app with CallKit integration for incoming calls that ring like a regular phone call. Available on TestFlight.
Electron-based client for Mac, Windows, and Linux — full messaging and calling from any computer.
Galosha's key insight: cross-border connections happen server‑to‑server, not client‑to‑server. From the perspective of a local ISP, users are simply talking to a domestic server.
Russian users connect to servers inside Russia — on VK Cloud, Yandex Cloud, and domestic VPS providers. The border is crossed by Jitsi Octo bridge cascading and SFU‑to‑SFU media bridges. What deep-packet inspection sees is a user talking to a Russian server.
All client traffic stays inside Russia. Signaling, media, and messaging all route through domestic servers first.
Cross-border relay is handled at the infrastructure level — invisible to the client and to ISP-level inspection.
If WebSocket is blocked, signaling falls back to HTTP long-polling automatically. If one server is unreachable, clients fail over.
A Rust-based proxy wraps connections in a stream indistinguishable from standard HTTPS — for residual exposure paths.
| Feature | Galosha | Telegram | Signal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works reliably in Russia | ✓ | Throttled | Intermittent | Throttled |
| No technical setup required | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Uses Russian domestic infrastructure | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| End-to-end encryption | ✓ activating | ✓ | Optional | ✓ |
| Self-hosted — no US hyperscaler | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
Galosha does not collect usage data, location, or browsing habits. There are no advertisers and no US hyperscaler in the loop. Audio and video pass through relay servers but are never recorded.
Galosha is a non-commercial project built and maintained by a single developer. All current features are free and will remain free. There will never be ads, data harvesting, or hidden fees.