Echo allows guest accounts, which seem convenient but is handled poorly, as there was spam and giant images blasted everywhere that slowed down and crashed my computer in one of the channels. My machine literally froze and had to be restarted. I feel this is both a failing of the Auth protection, general moderation, and how Echo handles the renderer and performance. A chat app shouldn't crash my top end machine because someone spammed some GIFs. And this was on the main Echo server where everyone, including the dev, was offline.

Not a fan of the aesthetics, purple is overdone. UI screams discord, but worse which is nice if you want something familiar but no thanks. 

Claims to be fully open source, yet only the client code is available. Code is also clearly vibe coded as well, not just AI assisted. 

There are several communities in the discovery tab, but none are joinable. You click join and nothing happens at all. The only server you can join is the Echo server it forces you into when you load the app. 

Browser console is just FLOODED with errors and warnings while sitting idle in chat. 

I don't have the option to delete a message I just sent. 

All of the menus and popovers have some awful transparency that make it so I can't actually read or use them. 

The DM menu does not open no matter how or when I click on it.

Voice chat wouldn't let me join. So couldn't test that or streaming. Judging by all the livekit errors in my console there's probably no hope for it. 

Graphical bugs abundant.

This ones just my opinion but it really looks horrible.

I cant set my custom status, it let me type it in the box but theres no way to save or enter it.

Everything is pretty slow, even opening the emoji picker etc.

There appears to be a discord bridge? But I'm not sure it's doing them any favors since it's just discord tagged people screaming at some frustrated Brazilian guy on Echo spamming questions and frustrations about why the app doesn't work. 

And because nothing else works or simply doesn't exist, thats the "hands on" portion of the review. I'll now get into the established EDAR standard.

Trust 0/9:

The App itself has had multiple security concerns and is entirely coded by (cheap) AI prompted by a 21 year old unemployed guy with no programming training or experience.

The Dev in question "ad3lyt, Adel, etc" isn't winning any points here either as he has aggressively targeted other apps in the past, and argued with people and been disrespectful since early 2026. 

Recently, he also started guerilla marketing by "Reviewing" his competitors, something no one asked for, and more importantly, was done horribly using a biased and inconsistent EDAR rating system that doesn't even measure actual useability for a communications app, like chat or video etc. Instead he assigned arbitrary values like "9/9 BECAUSE I HAVE HIGH HOPES FOR IT EVEN THOUGH ITS USELESS NOW" and "1/9 UI BECAUSE I DONT LIKE THEIR COLORS". This was almost amusing because of how useless it was but quickly became spammy when he would post \~5 reviews in 24 hours. Spending under 15 minutes to review an entire platform and then 30 minutes to write a biased narrowly-scoped review about competitor apps certainly didn't win him any love. And when people posted valid critical comments about it, he blocked them so they wouldn't be able to post feedback on his future posts. 

Yesterday, it came to light that he was breaking his own platforms terms and conditions by allowing minors to stay and encouraging them to lie about their age. A lot of interpretations even saw this as potential grooming behavior. A community poll is currently running with about 85% of the community calling for his immediate ban. The developer crashed out in the comments and called people slurs and demeaned disabled people, leading to some of his comments being removed. He tripled-down on his stance on sneaking in minors and saying cringe things like "they'll be adults soon". 

So yes, 0/9 points for trust.	

Experience 0/9

Let me just quote the Echo dev himself from another review: "Do you like shitty terrible unaesthetic uninspired, but also unoriginal UI whose been given close to 0 love, well to be fair some people may like boring UI's that are visually unimpresisve, those people however usually like their stuff to be intuitive and easy to use." Sadly, Echo has failed ALL of this criteria. 

Most of the "experience" is included at the top of the message. I'd almost give him some credit because you CAN technically send a message but since that's where functionality stops, it just rounds down to a zero.

Readiness 0/9: 

Since EDAR says you judge by population and activity, 0 points. There is literally no one online on the entire app except for me. I have no idea what platforms is available on or anything since the dev did some unorthodox thing where his app is hosted on a completely different domain than his marketing materials, so all this was tested with the webapp, unsure if other options exist, and if they did I surely didn't want to install them on my computer anyway.

Including a screenshot of their merch, if you're interested. And go cast your vote if you haven't already. I hope you enjoyed the Echo EDAR.

Echo EDAR Review 0/9 (SEP, 2026)