Beam desktop v0.4.0 — Ephemeral 2-device pairing
What changed
Beam is now a genuinely ephemeral, no-account, 2-device pairing tool instead of a persistent multi-device/friends system:
- No more accounts, friend connections, or admin panel — pairing is exactly two devices.
- Scanning a QR (or opening the pairing link) joins instantly — no separate "Pair" click needed.
- Once paired, the session runs for exactly 2 minutes, then the relay deletes everything about it: items, devices, uploaded files, all of it.
- Both devices can Send and Receive freely during the session — nothing locks either side into one role.
- The desktop app now just opens the same page a phone gets, kept always in sync with the web experience.
Note on this release
A parallel effort building this had a serious bug: the database migration needed to support the new model was missing, and once found and fixed, a second issue surfaced where old friend-shared data could crash the relay's background cleanup. Both were caught, fixed, tested, and verified live before this release went out — see the commit history on GitHub for the full detail if you're curious.
Download
Beam-Setup-Windows.exe is the stable link — always resolves to the latest release.