Free. iPhone, Android and browser. 18 and over.
Brane is a chat app for meeting people near you who care about the same things you do. You pick your interests, Brane shows you people and Crowds that match, and you start talking.
It runs on iPhone, on Android, and in any browser at .
Brane is a location and interest based chat app. Instead of following people, you find them: by what they are into, and by how close they are. Conversations happen one to one or in Crowds, which are Brane’s group chats.
Anyone who wants to talk to people they have not met yet. People new to a city, people with a niche interest and nobody around them to share it with, and clubs, teams, communities and event organisers who need somewhere for their people to talk.
No. Brane is for finding people to talk to, about the things you are into. There is no swiping and no matching on looks. Plenty of people use it to make friends in a new city or to find a local club, and it is built for that.
WhatsApp is for the people you already have. You need someone’s phone number before you can say a word to them. Brane is for the people you do not have yet. It finds them by shared interest and by distance, and you never exchange phone numbers to start talking, because Brane never asks for one.
Groups work the other way round too. A WhatsApp group is invite only and invisible to everyone outside it, so it can only ever grow by someone inside adding someone they know. A Crowd is public and discoverable by default: a stranger with the same interest finds it on the map or in search and joins in a tap.
And a Crowd does not have to live inside Brane. You can embed it on a website, so your club, team or event has its chat running on its own homepage. WhatsApp can give a site a link out to a group. Brane gives it the conversation itself.
Telegram is a messenger. It carries a conversation once you already know who you want to talk to, or already know the name of the group you are hunting for. Brane is built around the question that comes before that one: who near me is into this?
So Brane starts with discovery, not with a contact list. Every person and every Crowd sits on a map, ranked by shared interest and by distance, so you find your people without knowing a single name, link or invite in advance. You join with an email address, and Brane never asks for a phone number.
Then Brane goes somewhere a messenger does not: onto your own website. A Crowd embeds into any page as a live chat panel, and a visitor signs in with an email code inside the panel and is talking in seconds, without leaving your site or installing anything. Linking out to Telegram sends your visitors away, and asks them for an account and a phone number before they can say hello. Brane also embeds one to one chats, so the same tool runs your support desk.
Yes. Creating an account, finding people, joining Crowds, sending messages and making your own Crowd are all free. Brane Premium, which verifies your account with a Blue Tick and allows you to change your default location, is optional.
No. There are no ads anywhere in Brane, and no advertising SDK in the app. Your feed is ordered by shared interest and distance, never by who paid to be in it.
Melbourne, Australia.
Yes. .
Yes. .
Brane never asks for your phone number or your real name. You sign up with an email address, you are known by a username you pick, and your display name and photo are yours to fill in or leave alone. On top of that, Brane is 18+, every profile and every message carries Block and Report, Crowd owners can delete messages and remove members, and your position on the map is approximate rather than exact and can be switched off completely.
No. You pick a username, and your display name can be anything you like or nothing at all. Brane has no real name policy and nothing checks who you say you are.
No. Brane never asks for one, so nobody can find you by it and there is no number to leak. An email address is all you sign up with.
Enter your email address. Brane sends you a six digit code, you type it in, and you are in. There is no password to invent or remember
Yes. Go to Settings and choose Password, then set one. This allows you to share access to Brane with your team without having to share access to your email inbox.
On the sign in screen there is a row of buttons under the email field. Tap the envelope one and you get email and password sign in.
Yes, in the Brane app on supported devices. Both buttons are on the sign in screen. In a browser, use the email code or a password.
Check your spam or junk folder first, codes usually land within a minute. If it is still missing, tap “Send a new code”. Codes expire, so always use the newest one.
A username and date of birth, a profile photo, a short bio, up to five interests, and your location. These can all be changed at any time.
Yes, Brane is 18+. Accounts are limited to adults and discovery never shows anyone under 18.
Yes. Go to in any browser and sign in with your email. It is the full Brane app, same account and same conversations as your phone, laid out for a wide screen with your chats down the side and the conversation open beside them.
Yes, at . Nothing to install and no extension to add, just open it and sign in with a six digit email code.
Yes. Brane.chat runs the whole app in your browser, so you can find people, join Crowds, send messages and share photos without installing an app.
Open the Explore tab. It is a live map of the people and Crowds around you, and tapping any pin opens that profile so you can message or wave.
Open the People tab. It is your personal feed of people who share your interests, sorted nearest first, and it keeps loading further out as you scroll.
Type an interest into the search bar on People, Crowds or Explore. You can also tap any interest on someone’s profile to search for everyone else who listed it.
Yes. The search filter lets you set a distance, an age range, and whether you want to see people, Crowds, or both.
Search their username in the People tab. Every profile also has a public link at brane.im/u/username that opens their profile directly.
A wave is a one tap hello. It tells someone you are interested in talking without having to think of an opening line, and they get a notification.
Open their profile and tap Message. That starts a private one to one chat, no request or approval needed.
Usually because location is off. Brane needs device location to place you on the map, so turn it on in your phone settings and the map fills in.
Open Explore as soon as you land. Everyone and every Crowd around you is on the map, the People tab sorts your interest matches nearest first, and the Crowds tab shows the local groups and events. If you are moving somewhere and want to look before you arrive, use Search Globally to set the new city as your search origin.
Anyone on Brane can send you a message or a wave, the same way you can message them. If you would rather someone did not, block them and they can no longer reach you.
Yes, with Brane Teleport. On the Explore map, tap Search Globally at the bottom of the screen and type an address. Explore, People and Crowds all recenter on it, and Return Home in the same dialog puts you back. You get two free teleports, then it is part of Premium.
No. A teleport only changes what you see. Other people still see you where you actually are.
Tap the attachment button next to the message box and choose the image icon. You can crop it and add a caption before sending.
Same attachment button, video icon. Sending video is available in the mobile app only, not in the browser, and there is a size limit, so trim long clips before sending.
It is over the upload size limit. Trim it or pick a shorter clip and try again.
Six, plus your profile photo. Tap any photo on a profile to open it full size.
A Crowd is Brane’s group chat. It has its own name, photo, description, location and interests, and anyone can find and join it unless it has a join code.
Go to the Crowds tab and tap the add button. You name the Crowd, add a photo and description, drop a pin for where it is based, tag it with interests, and it is live.
Create a Crowd and turn on “Is this an event?”. You then set a start and end time, and the event appears on the map and in search in the run up to it.
Create a Crowd, drop the pin at your ground or usual meeting point, and tag it with your sport. Local people searching that interest will find it, and you can add a join code if you want it members only.
They find it on the Crowds tab or the map and tap Join Crowd. You can also share its link, brane.im/c/crowd-name, anywhere you like.
Share its link. Every Crowd has one at brane.im/c/crowd-name, and Share Crowd in the chat menu hands it to you, ready to paste into a group chat, an email or a post. Anyone who opens it can join in a tap, and people who have never heard of Brane can still find the Crowd themselves on the Crowds tab or the map.
Open the Crowd menu and set a Join Code. Only people you give the code to can join. Remove the code to make it public again.
The Crowds tab shows Groups Near You, Most Popular Crowds, and Events Near You when there is an event within 100km. The Explore map shows Crowds as pins too.
Yes. The Crowd owner can edit the name, photo, description, location and interests from the chat menu.
Crowd owners can delete any message, and kick a member with the option to ban them from rejoining. A ban cannot be undone.
Use Share Crowd in the chat menu. It gives you a link that opens the Crowd for anyone who taps it.
Create a Crowd with the event toggle on and set the start and end times. It then shows on the map and in search until it finishes.
Open the Crowds tab. Events Near You lists what is coming up within 100km, and the Explore map shows events as pins alongside everything else. To look at another city, set it as your search origin with Search Globally first.
It drops out of search and off the map, and the chat stays open so everyone who came can keep talking.
Yes. Add to Calendar is in the event’s chat menu, and it adds the event with its real start and end times.
Open the event chat menu and choose Edit Event Times.
Yes. Any member of a Crowd can add one line of script to a site and the Crowd’s chat opens in a panel on the page.
Open the Crowd, tap the chat menu, and choose Embed on Website. Brane emails you the snippet and the instructions. On a wide screen there is also an Embed On Website item in Settings, which opens the setup guide at .
Yes. Use data-user="username" instead of data-crowd and the panel opens a direct chat with that person, which is what a support widget wants.
Yes. data-primary and data-secondary set the colours, data-theme picks light or dark, data-welcome sets the sign in message, and data-position moves the launcher to the left or right.
Yes. Set data-launcher="none" and open the panel yourself with window.Brane.open().
No. They sign in with an email code in the panel itself and can chat straight away in the browser.
Answer while they are still on your page and they see it straight away. If they have closed the tab, your reply is emailed to them with what you wrote in it. When they come back the conversation picks up exactly where it stopped.
Then no email goes out. The email is the backup, not the delivery.
No. Crowds with a join code are not embeddable, because the panel has nowhere to ask for the code. Remove the join code to embed it.
No. Unless a Crowd has a join code added to it, it is a public group chat on the Brane platform. Therefore in the spirit of open community, any member of a public Crowd can share and embed it.
Go to the You tab, open your interests, and add or remove them. You can have up to five.
They are how Brane decides who to show you, and who sees you. Your People feed, your Crowd suggestions and the “someone nearby likes this too” notification are all built from them, so a good set of five is the difference between a useful feed and a random one.
Yes. Pick from the popular tags, or tap “add your own” and type any single word. If nobody has used it yet, you are the first, and the next person who adds it finds you.
Because they are matching signals, not a list of hobbies. Five keeps your matches sharp rather than diluting them.
Only the ones you match on are ever shown to another person. The rest stay private.
Settings, then “Edit Username & Display Name”.
Your display name, photo, bio, headline, website and photo gallery. It is also live on the web at brane.im/u/username.
Use Share My Profile in Settings or the menu. It copies your brane.im link, which opens your profile in a browser and lets people message you from there.
Settings, then Email address.
New messages, waves, profile views, leaderboard updates, announcements, and a heads up when someone nearby shares one of your interests.
We also send email, and only about messages you have not read. Once a week, if something is waiting, a reminder that names who is waiting and never quotes what they said. Muting a conversation takes it out of that email as well.
If you started talking to somebody through a chat embedded on their website and you do not have the app, you also get an email when they reply, so a question you asked on a website does not sit unanswered in a tab you closed.
At most once a week, and only when you have unread direct messages. Everybody is on their own weekly cycle rather than all of them going out on the same day.
Who is waiting for you and how many conversations, never what anybody said. Open Brane to read the messages themselves.
Settings, then Preferences. You can switch message notifications and wave notifications separately. If notifications are off at the operating system level, Brane tells you and links you straight to the right settings screen.
The reminder email is a separate control, and every one of them carries an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Turning message notifications off in Preferences stops the email too.
Your username, display name, photo, bio and gallery, which together make your profile, and it is also a web page at brane.im/u/username. Your email address and date of birth are not public, and neither are the interests you were not matched on.
Approximate only. Maps show a fuzzy area rather than your exact position, and you can turn map sharing off entirely in Preferences.
Settings, then Preferences, then turn off “Share location on map”.
To show you people, Crowds and events near you. Without it the map cannot open and discovery has nothing to sort by.
Yes. Sign in on as many devices as you like, your chats stay in sync across all of them.
Settings, then Log out. On a phone it is in the menu drawer.
Settings, then Delete Account. Deletion cannot be undone.
Your profile stops being reachable, on Brane and at your brane.im link, and you are removed from the Crowds you were in. It cannot be reversed, so signing up again starts a new account rather than restoring the old one.
A subscription that adds a verified blue tick, unlimited Brane Teleport, priority in search and discovery, and early access to new features.
It marks the account as verified. Premium subscribers get it automatically, and it is also granted manually in some cases.
No. Subscriptions go through the App Store and Google Play, so buy Premium in the mobile app. Once it is active your verified tick and unlimited Teleport follow your account everywhere you sign in, brane.chat included.
Open Brane Premium from Settings and tap Restore purchases.
Brane needs device location for the map. Turn location on for Brane in your phone settings, and the map opens itself as soon as the permission lands.
Check Settings, then Preferences. If the operating system is blocking them, Brane shows a banner there with a button that takes you to the right place.
Scroll with your mouse wheel, pinch on a trackpad, or use the plus, minus and slider controls at the bottom right of the map.
Settings, then Support.
