Chicago, IL — Point your camera at a QR code on a parking meter, a cocktail menu or a flyer taped to a lamp pole, and the same thing happens every time: the phone asks whether you would like to open a link. The code is a door, and what is on the other side of it is usually a website.
Checkered Chat’s codes are not doors. They are the message.
The text lives inside the pattern. That is why there is no account to make, no inbox to clear and no server keeping a copy — and why a code handed to you by a stranger has nowhere to take you.
Enter Checkered Chat, an iPhone and Apple Watch app from Chicago creative studio HoneyWired® that turns a note into a QR code and gives the code an alibi.
Write It, Hand It Over, They Scan It
Three steps, and not one of them asks for an email address.
- Write it: a message and a mode, and the composition is done. A meter beside it says whether the code will still scan at the size you mean to print it.
- Hand it over: hold up the screen, save the picture, print a sheet of stickers, or drop it into Messages. The code is the message, so however it travels is however it travels.
- They scan it: an open code opens in any camera. Everything else opens in Checkered Chat, which asks the question, lifts the cover, or gathers the pieces.
Two Notes, One Code
The decoy is the one that has to be seen to be believed. Two messages ride in a single code: any ordinary camera reads the first, and Checkered Chat reads both.
It is the birthday card that scans as “Happy birthday” for the whole table and as something better for the person it is for. Put one in a group chat and everybody reads the cover story off their own phone, which is the fun of it at a party.
Five Ways to Say It
- Open: ordinary text in an ordinary code. Anyone’s camera reads it, which is sometimes exactly the point.
- Locked: a question only they can answer. Capitals and punctuation do not count, because nobody remembers their own punctuation.
- Decoy: the cover story above, the real note underneath.
- Split: one message across several codes, with the arithmetic up to you. Any three of five open it; any two tell you nothing at all. Not less — nothing.
- Animated: a message too long for one code, played as a set of frames the other phone catches in any order, with a ring that fills as they arrive.
Open and Locked are free. Decoy, Split and Animated are the unlock, and the first three are on the house.
In Messages, and on Your Wrist
Write a code in the Messages drawer and it goes straight into the conversation. Anyone who has the app taps the bubble and the message opens — no camera, no second device, no screenshot. Everyone else sees a code they can point a camera at, and gets whatever that code says they get.
On the Apple Watch, a code draws at the largest size the glass allows, and the Watch says only that one arrived: never the message, never a preview, not even a decoy’s first note. A lock screen is the most public thing anyone owns. The Watch shows codes and never reads them, because there is no camera on a wrist.
Stickers That Actually Scan
A sticker that won’t scan has usually failed for one of two dull reasons: the code was exported as a bitmap and then resized, or the label template was approximated rather than measured. Both are avoidable, and the app avoids them.
Codes are drawn as paths and exported as vector PDFs, so a two-inch sticker is two inches on paper rather than two inches minus whatever the renderer rounded away. Every sheet in the catalog is measured from the manufacturer’s own published template, and the app says which product each one came from. Sizes it has not measured are not on the list.
Printers drift, so there is an alignment sheet: print the outlines, hold them against a real sheet of labels, and nudge in half-millimeter steps. The nudge is kept for that stock, so it is found once.
No Server to Trust
“Every QR code in the world is a shortcut to somewhere else,” says Kevin McGlone, Creative Director at HoneyWired. “We wanted one that wasn’t going anywhere. The note is inside the code, so there’s no server to trust, nothing to delete and nobody to ask. And because a code is just a picture, you can stick it on a lamppost, print it on a cake, or hold it up across a room.”
Honest About Its Limits
Checkered Chat is a toy. A locked code is a bit of fun, not a safe: whoever holds it can guess at it for as long as they like, and a decoy hides a message from a casual glance rather than from anyone who examines what the code actually contains. The app says so, in about those words, on its own page.
The cryptography underneath is Apple’s — AES-GCM and PBKDF2, through CryptoKit and CommonCrypto — and the arithmetic that splits a key across several codes is Shamir’s Secret Sharing, published in 1979 and implemented from the published description. None of which makes it a security product, and it does not claim to be one.
The Privacy Is in the Architecture
- No networking code: nothing is collected, sent or stored, and there is no code in the app to send it with. Airplane mode changes nothing.
- The camera is for scanning: frames are examined on the device, looking only for QR codes. Nothing is recorded, photographed, saved or transmitted.
- A code carries text and only text: never a web address, never anything a phone could be talked into opening. That is a rule the app is built on rather than a setting that can be switched off.
Pricing and Availability
Checkered Chat is available now on the App Store, free to download. Reading any code is free, and so is writing an open or locked one. The $9.99 unlock — paid once, no subscription, no ads — adds decoys, split sets, animated sets, module shapes and frames, and sticker sheets, with the first three codes in a paid mode on the house. Requires an iPhone running iOS 26.5 or later; the Watch app needs watchOS 26.0.
Download Checkered Chat on the App Store →
See it at honeywired.com/apps/checkered-chat.