GifOS is a free, open-source web operating system where every app is a GIF. Open gifos.app and you get a persistent Home Screen that lives in your browser — no account, no installs, and nothing stored on anyone's servers. Every file you own is just that: a file.
Open your computer →A GifOS app is a real, animated GIF image carrying a tiny filesystem inside. Double-click it and it runs in a hardened sandbox. Whatever you do in the app — notes, game moves, drawings — is saved inside its icon. Send the GIF to a friend and they get your app with your stuff in it. It looks like an image because it is one.
Press Invite in any app and send the link (gifos.app/join/…). Friends tap it and they're in — same game, same notes, live. Your browser is the server; traffic goes peer-to-peer when networks allow, with a tiny stateless relay as fallback.
The link is a capability: anyone who has it joins live and can save a full copy of that app's data — your browser syncs the whole dataset to theirs, so there's no un-sharing what they've seen. Invite gives you two independent dials. How long the link lets new people in — while the app is open (default), 1 hour, 24 hours, or forever; a timed link just stops admitting newcomers, it never kicks the people already there. And what happens if you drop off — it ends for everyone (default, safest for private data), or a still-connected friend keeps it going from their copy (best for games, so a dead battery doesn't end game night). New link revokes the old one instantly.
The built-in Meeting connects everyone directly, browser to browser. The relay only performs introductions — it physically refuses to carry audio or video. Quality adapts automatically as more people join. A meeting is a permanent room: the link works forever, no matter who created it or who left. Everyone joins muted with the camera off, you can fully blur your video, anyone can mute or blur a misbehaving participant for the whole room (always attributed), and any participant can lock the room with a password that only the people in the meeting hold. Audio-only is fine — the camera is always optional.
A meeting isn't just faces in boxes. Press Run app and pick one of your apps — it opens on the shared stage and everyone in the meeting uses it together, the same live state, exactly like joining an app by link, only now with voice, video and recording wrapped around it. Play a board game, sketch together, run a quiz. There are two doors to the same room: start a meeting and load an app into it, or open an app and hit Meeting in its tab to turn it into one. Both land you in the identical place.
The IRL Games folder is for people in the same room: one person opens a game and taps Invite, everyone joins from their own phone, and secret roles, hidden votes, and sneaky lies appear on each screen while the laughing and accusing happens face to face — social-deduction, bluffing, and mind-meld games included. Only one phone in the room? There's a pass-the-phone folder too.
Tell Claude (or any AI) what you want — any AI learns the GifOS format from gifos.app/llms.txt. Two ways to land it on your Home Screen: paste the code it writes into ＋ Add and GifOS packs it into a finished App GIF for you; or, if the AI can run code and attach files, it follows the recipe in llms.txt and hands you a finished .gif file directly — animated icon and all. The Easter egg move: give the AI your favorite GIF from your camera roll and it hides the app inside that exact GIF — it still looks and plays like the original everywhere, but on a GifOS Home Screen it secretly runs.
Apps are files, and files get modded — GifOS celebrates it. Hand any app GIF to your AI and ask for changes ("add a dark mode", "make the buttons bigger"): it opens the GIF, edits what's inside, and hands you back the same GIF — animation untouched, your saved stuff intact. Spot an app you like in a friend's session? Steal App drops a fresh copy into your Stolen Apps treasure chest to make your own. Remixes ship unsigned — a mod is a new work, yours to sign.
Back up your entire Home Screen — every file, icon, and app's data — as a single GIF. Double-click a backup anywhere and boot it as a computer inside your computer, without touching what's already there. Yes, recursively.
The whole system — desktop, codec, relay — is on GitHub. What gifos.app serves is byte-for-byte what's in the repo, so anyone can audit it.
Try GifOS now →Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue on GitHub — describe what happened (or what you'd like), include the digit subdomain and steps to reproduce if it's a bug, and we'll take a look. No account with us needed, just a free GitHub login.
GifOS — apps are GIFs, data is GIFs, everything is just files. · gifos.app · llms.txt · source · issues