Lightning is a desktop messenger for Matrix, the open network for secure, decentralised communication. Sign in to any homeserver, or to several accounts at once, and reach people wherever their account lives.
Conversations are organised into Spaces, rooms and threads. Send rich text, pictures, files, voice messages, polls, reactions and custom emoji, and find something you sent months ago without scrolling back to it.
Private rooms are end-to-end encrypted throughout: verify your other devices by comparing emoji, restore your keys from backup, and search even your encrypted rooms with an index that never leaves this computer.
Group voice calls and screen sharing run in the room itself.
Screenshots
Observed history
| App | Change | Version | When ↑ |
|---|---|---|---|
| new | 0.10.1 | 23 Sept 2026 | |
| updated | 0.10.1 | 11 Oct 2026 |
Upstream releases
Release notes supplied by the developer. These dates are not Flathub package publication times.
0.10.17 Oct 2026
A release about sharing your screen with the right sound, chats that look the way you set them on every device, and a long list of fixes that came from reports: bubbles whose captions you could not read, muted rooms that were not quiet, a Flatpak that crashed on start, and an rpm that dnf replaced with a different program.
0.10.01 Oct 2026
A release about calls that hold up, a sign-in that says what it wants, and Spaces you can actually run. Most of it came from reports: a voice call that went quiet after every join and leave, a crash on hang-up that only slower machines could reach, a server address that had to be typed in full, and pictures that stayed blank until the first scroll.
0.9.921 Sept 2026
A release made mostly of the interface: a sustained accessibility and layout pass that turned dozens of "needs looking at" observations into fixed defects, a Spaces rail you can now shape to taste, and a first-class NixOS package contributed from outside the project. Nothing in the messaging, calling or encryption contracts changed; this is the release that makes what was already there legible, reachable and correctly drawn.
0.9.817 Sept 2026
The release that actually delivers what 0.9.7 promised, and says plainly where 0.9.7 did not.