File sharing
AChat lets you share files inside any chat — up to 10 MB per file and 100 MB total per chat — with image previews, a full-screen lightbox, and a multi-file upload queue. Files follow the same 10-day auto-delete lifecycle as messages.
Limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Max size per file | 10 MB |
| Max total per chat | 100 MB |
| Storage backend | FilesHub (public visibility) |
| Lifetime | Auto-deletes ~10 days after upload |
When a chat reaches the 100 MB cap, new uploads are blocked until older files expire.
How uploading works
- Attach or drag in one or more files. AChat queues them and uploads them to FilesHub.
- Images get an inline preview and open in a lightbox when tapped.
- In threads, you can attach files to a reply, not just the top-level conversation.
- A small upload queue UI shows progress for multiple files at once.
Where the bytes live
Files are stored on FilesHub, AChat's free-tier file backend, with public visibility (so previews load without an API key in the browser). AChat stores a reference to the file on the message/file document in Firestore.
Privacy & honest limits
- File bytes are not encrypted at rest. On passworded chats, AChat encrypts the file's URL and metadata, but the contents on FilesHub are not encrypted. Do not upload anything you would not want a holder of the raw URL to see.
- Open chats expose files to anyone with the chat ID.
- Cleanup is lazy. Firestore TTL removes the file document on schedule; the FilesHub object is cleaned up lazily when the chat is next loaded, so a file in a room nobody revisits can linger past the nominal window.