VoiceCat is a self-hosted channel-based voice and text system. Control traffic uses TLS 1.3; media uses authenticated encrypted UDP derived from the TLS session. There is no plaintext mode or central service.

Current references:

architecture.md — components, ownership, concurrency, and native boundary.
api-dotnet.md — managed API and ownership contracts.
building.md — development, platform builds, tests, and publishing.
deployment.md — server packaging and operations.
ios-deploy.md — physical-device iOS build and deployment.
tech-stack.md — supported dependencies and licensing.
broadcast-ring-format.md — frozen extension/host ring ABI.

proto/voicecat.proto is the control-plane wire contract. Managed tests are the executable behavior contract. Keep prose current with those sources rather than documenting historical implementations.

Durable rules:

Encryption is mandatory.
GPL and LGPL dependencies are forbidden.
Real-time audio callbacks never allocate, lock, block, or perform I/O.
The server relays encoded media; it does not mix or transcode it.
Wire, database, and shared-ring changes are explicitly versioned.