A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

https://bitchat.free/

by no_creativity_ • 6 months ago

636 339 6 months ago

bitchat.free

jagermo2• 6 months ago

I don't know. I do not like Jack Dorey's involvement. Not a big fan of his.

I'd rather use Briar (https://briarproject.org/)

atoav• 6 months ago

If you don't like a thing and share that dislike, care to elaborate your reasoning so others can profit from it?

bariswheel2• 6 months ago

Indeed, it's immature to disclose an opinion without being forthcoming and add some objective rationale behind a bold conclusion as disliking an entire person. It may be something they said, or did, getting specific would help, ideally something that is relevant to the original thread. It's not entirely helpful and potentially a negative impact to just imply you don't like someone. Do what you want obviously, that's my 2 cents.

akiarie• 6 months ago

Obviously because he was one of the architects of the censorship regime of the late 2010s and early 2020s that nearly changed the internet into a three-letter-agency controlled space. If that isn't a risk for a censorship-resistant app, I don't know what is.

gloxkiqcza• 6 months ago

There’s no app for Apple platforms making it a lot less useful.

jagermo2• 6 months ago

fair point, especially in the west. But looking at the market share, Android is probably the platform to build for, especially if you have an additional phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

maqp8• 6 months ago

That's probably because AFAIK Apple doesn't allow process forking, making any Tor-based messenger almost impossible to run as Tor would have to run as part of the main thread.

prmoustache• 6 months ago

Briar has the advantage of being usable with bluetooth and internet so it makes it much more useful.

troupo• 6 months ago

Apple pulled similar apps from the App Store: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/10/768841864/after-china-objects...

utopiah• 6 months ago

True but I assume Apple users understand they exclude themselves by demanding a "benevolent dictator" insuring they are "safe".

zikduruqe• 6 months ago

How about Berty?

https://berty.tech/features

anigbrowl• 6 months ago

Buy a cheap shit android phone for under $100 and never associate it with a SIM

goodpoint• 6 months ago

Also why reinventing the wheel? There is already Briar.

keepamovin• 6 months ago

I agree, enthusiastically and wholeheartedly. The mere presence of a potentially-cancellable person poisons the entire tech stach, regardless of any other merits. If I were to use such technology I would risk becoming morally tainted by JD's potential-objectionableness, a social risk I am entirely unwilling to take. I simply cannot endorse such technology that is not fully sanctioned by the High Table of Moral Certification & Transactional Stamp Duty. I must therefore distance myself from any such endorsements and withdraw my support regardless of whatever so-called "technological" merits such technology may claim.

Please view my participation in this discussion as certified proof of the objective verification of my moral essence. I hereby claim superiority now and forever over JD and any such users of said technologies. Sincerely and respectfully (without any possible hints of objectionableness), the undersigned.

trueno4• 6 months ago

I personally don't care if its bitchat or briar, I care about the most effective proven implementation in the end. Such a technology is needed now, not later, and if if bitchat started out as dorseys vibe coded side project last year and has now grown into something greater, then so be it.

olejorgenb• 6 months ago

There's also Berty https://berty.tech/features/

mikecamara• 6 months ago

What happened to that fire chat app that did the same thing back in 2014 or something?

Kina2• 6 months ago

I remember distinctly that the developers said they were working on a next generation version of it and it just never happened.

I think they just ran out of funding and died with a whimper.

budududuroiu4• 6 months ago

Seeing Jack committing to this repo is kinda wild to me. I also wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting

JumpCrisscross4• 6 months ago

wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting

A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.

When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.

Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)

Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.

[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/

niemandhier2• 6 months ago

Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive.

For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.

sgt3• 6 months ago

WV is probably heavily underrated. Such a beautiful part of the US.

cedws3• 6 months ago

American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.

budududuroiu4• 6 months ago

I've never seriously considered this, but that's a sobering realisation that most of these numbers are more achievable than most think.

Thanks for the inspiration, I should run my numbers as well.

komali22• 6 months ago

I thought fuck-you money also included the ability to explore whatever you want in a way that included e.g. hiring a team to explore projects for you as startups?

Also everyone I know with fuck you money already lives in Asia for cost of living reasons, but spends half the year jet setting to various raves and rich people shenanigans in random places like Croatia.

maqp8• 6 months ago

Could someone please explain in what situation do you use a BlueTooth messaging app? Like, even BT5 range won't exceed 400 meters. What good is this? You're not going to send images to journalists from protests with it (you'd do wisely to keep it in airplane mode until you get home and then you'd upload them to their securedrop or whatever), and you don't need off-band security to let the kids know it's dinner time.

melting_snow2• 6 months ago

I see two use cases: * Communication between protestors * Illegal activities, but here I can imagine that bluetooth range is too small

reddalo• 6 months ago

I remember when Telegram had a "Nearby" feature. I remember seeing many not-so-legal activities around me, even in the range of 1 km.

thijson• 6 months ago

I remember reading that men and women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden from interacting directly in a bar setting. So instead they were using Bluetooth to covertly connect and communicate.

catlifeonmars5• 6 months ago

Communication between protestors Illegal activities

Often one and the same since the first thing those in power try to do is make various activities by protestors illegal

3RTB2972• 6 months ago

The use cases stem from groups needing coordination in roughly the same area, with no internet. Disaster recovery efforts fit this exactly:

Doctors Without Borders feeding centers in a famine far from anywhere, searching for people in the rubble of a building following an earthquake, searching for people in a refugee camp, etc.

Verizon went down in the US this past week - perfect use case for Bitchat (or Meshtastic with a repeater or some other LoRa BT network). Verizon goes down while you're at the mall or store or Disneyland or whatever and you can still text to find each other.

300m max range with line of sight would cover something like when I go to visit my parents who live in a desert canyon with lousy mobile phone coverage, I can send a message that I'm at the gate and put the dogs in the garage.

Almondsetat2• 6 months ago

This is simply an app that allows to communicate through bluetooth locally. Why are you saying its only two use cases are protesting and criminals?

yaris3• 6 months ago

Any situation when mobile internet cannot be used. That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings, i.e. street concerts, or places where mobile coverage is poor in general.

oreilles• 6 months ago

Or planes.

em-bee3• 6 months ago

but i use mobile internet because of the distance. how does bluetooth help with that?

pipo2342• 6 months ago

That is not only protests, but also legal gatherings[...]

Oops! You (unintentionally?) make it sound like protests are illegal.

gchokov• 6 months ago

This particular one supports mesh, so the range could be way way higher.

behnamoh2• 6 months ago

In Iran right now... Internet shut down while the regime keeps slaughtering people at the order of 4x9/11.

sgt3• 6 months ago

I think you need to try to get MUCH more video and photo footage out. I heard thousands have been killed.

throwaway7584392• 6 months ago

Internet is exploited by US as a tool for regime change [1] in coordination with sponsored on the ground terrorism. [1]

[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY

zenmac3• 6 months ago

One of these bluetooth messaging app was made by a developer who was on a cruise ship with family, and the Internet over satellite costs an arm and leg. So he wrote an app to communicate with his families over bluetooth.

Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you? Seems like bluetooth is the perfect way to communicate for devices that are close to each other.

nly• 6 months ago

It's a cruiseship. Your family are at the nearest bar. Just get off your ass and go and give them the message.

maqp8• 6 months ago

Yeah I can imagine a jam-packed cruise ship might be useful provided the signal propagates from deck to another (unlikely), but it's quite a niché use case.

Also why would one want to have the data go over some servers thousands miles away when the device is right next to you?

Why would that matter? Use Signal to protect the content, or use Cwtch to protect content and metadata. If you need to exchange secret communications that mustn't go through some server, why not discuss f2f with no phones around? You'd also eliminate attack vectors where your (chances are, Chinese Android) device spies on you, as well as anyone who has compromised it to read messages from screen.

cyxxon• 6 months ago

I remember a different app thats was used on e.g. festivals where the local broadcast cells where overwhelmed when a quite rural area suddenly had to server 50000 to 100000 additional people and 3g and 4G basically stopped working. I think it was called Firechat or something.

tomtomtom777• 6 months ago

Still, wouldn't a wifi meshnet be a better choice for these scenario's?

mlrtime3• 6 months ago

On a cruise ship, isn't the cheap walkie talkies still a thing? Or did those die with cell phones?

For me the cell phone without internet is almost useless, not much I can do on it, might as well sue a purpose built device. They're also very cheap.

Even better if Nextel still worked on phones (but without service).

lormayna4• 6 months ago

On a similar situation, someone try Meshtastic and it works great

https://old.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1qd2z97/mestast...

I doubt that BLE can propagate well over a cruise ship.

bcraven2• 6 months ago

Back in the 2010s I used the 'Notes' applications to send messages via Bluetooth on my Sony Ericsson to chat with a girl in the next bunk.

There was no signal in the remote Irish hostel so it was the perfect way to send messages covertly in the dormitory.

Fun night!

mlrtime3• 6 months ago

Don't keep us guessing, what did you guys talk about :)

pbiggar2• 6 months ago

Consider if you live in Gaza. Israel has destroyed all the telecoms equipment across the Gaza strip (and everything else). You were ordered to leave your home by Israeli soldiers, but now the school you're sheltering in is being bombed. You may need to leave, but you believe there may be sniper drones outside.

- You want to check in with people around you about what to do - You want to check on the health of your family, from whom you were separated

ifwinterco4• 6 months ago

In theory if as many people use bitchat as used whatsapp somewhere like central london, everyone actually could communicate in a fully decentralised manner - you're frequently in bluetooth range of other people's phones just walking around or even sat in your house.

Would that actually happen? No, but it's an interesting thought experiment

maqp8• 6 months ago

So other users are broadcasting messages of third parties onwards? How many devices does it take to saturate the channel? What does this do for phone battery?

lxgr11• 6 months ago

Bluetooth 5 introduced "coded PHY", which allows ranges of over 1 km in ideal conditions. As I understand it, adding support for this wouldn't even require new hardware for most recent phones.

The real obstacles here are political, not technical, as evidenced by the complete absence of any built-in solution that could be so useful in both everyday life (messaging a family member on the same plane when sitting separately, national park trips etc.) and emergencies.

We literally got smartphone-to-satellite comms now, but we're lacking the most barebones peer-to-peer functionality.

IshKebab2• 6 months ago

Huh I didn't know about that. Seems like it uses 8 symbols per bit to increase the range (but I would very seriously doubt you ever get close to 1km except in super ideal "both in a field in the middle of nowhere" scenarios that never actually happen.

Apparently it's an optional part of Bluetooth 5, so not necessarily supported. However I just checked my phone (Pixel 8) and it is supported. You can check in the nRF Connect app.

jojobas• 6 months ago

When your Ayatollah decides to shut down internet and you are near people you don't really know in an urban environment?

kozika• 6 months ago

Now that Wi-Fi Aware is supported on iOS, I think supporting it should significantly expand the transmission range.

ellis0n• 6 months ago

I have seen a test of bitchat using radio communication over a distance of more than 5 km. There were also other methods to extend BT range.

elicash• 6 months ago

Asking "what good is this?" in a dismissive tone should be against the rules in a space like Hacker News.

jcims• 6 months ago

I've wanted something like this numerous times for long flights.

I also have recently got into caving, which usually results in 5-50 people camping over weekends in rural Kentucky. No signal most of the time.

einaralex• 6 months ago

I was at a music festival last summer, and the phone network was completely down. I could use BitChat to find my mates.

reconnecting• 6 months ago

Here are original posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929358

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364146

nicois• 6 months ago

One missing feature: deferred message propagation. As far as I understand, while messages will be rebroadcast until a TTL is exhausted, there is no mechanism to retain in-transit messages and retransmit them to future peers. While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage.

You should be able to write a message and not rely on the recipient being available when you press send. You should also be able to run nodes to cache messages for longer, and opt in to holding messages for a greater time period. This would among other things allow couriers between disjoint groups of users.

trueno4• 6 months ago

that is a super good callout.

this is prob the 100th time ive read about bitchat here, and the comments are largely the same (use briarchat, none of these really work that well, i dont like jack dorsey, etc) every time.

but this is interesting. and i agree strongly with this: "While this adds overheads, it's table stakes for real-life usage."

i suppose events like iran are really making me wonder if this stuff is possible it feels like anyone who's under the chokehold of regimes has completely run out of options, but even in America I'm getting the sweats wondering if there's going to be a time where such techs are needed. from what i gather none of these decentralized p2p messengers work well at all, but I also haven't truly tried. I can think of some moments that would've been viable test grounds though. Was at Outsidelands festival in San Fran and cell service was pretty much DOA due to the volume of people trying to hit the same tower(s). Even airtags which everyone in the group had on their beltloop weren't working.

throwaway82113• 6 months ago

Lack of retention can actually be a feature in these types of situations. It should be opt-in. The government would actually need to infiltrate the network in order to read the conversations, instead of just retrieving the messages from the cache on a confiscated phone

3RTB2972• 6 months ago

It's funny how 3 or 4 similar BLE systems each are slightly different, and yet no one wants to just merge all the features for an obviously superior product. Everyone seems fine squabbling about which incomplete app/system is better.

Just take what's there and include the obvious next steps:

- Meshtastic and Meshcore ability to use relay nodes for long range BLE networks (Briar doesn't allow)

- Store and hold encrypted messages, as noted above.

- Ability to route through the internet, prioritize routing methods, disable internet routing, etc.

- Ability to self-host server for online relays (similar to Matrix)

Angostura2• 6 months ago

Is the issue with this that mobile OSs - iOS in particular are rather aggressive about shutting down apps in the background after a while?

trueno4• 6 months ago

iOS definitely made a name for itself to the ire of many for this many moons ago, but it's a fairly ubiquitous default behavior for mobile phone operating systems now (because battery life) even on android

firesteelrain• 6 months ago

What you are talking about is called “store and forward” [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_and_forward

brk2• 6 months ago

Not just deferred message propagation, but also a way to setup medium to high powered rebroadcasting stations. For political unrest scenarios, you don't always need 2-way communication, but you do need to distribute critical info. A listen-only mode makes it very difficult to track individual users (no RF transmissions), and would cover a large percentage of a critical use case.

All of this is solved with the store-and-forward model that you highlight.

A Lora dongle seems to be better than BT, though potentially incriminating.

rm3010• 6 months ago

I’ve read all the posts and, as the 'old man of the village', I would suggest taking a look at FidoNet. It was running 40 years ago, for more than a decade, before the internet was available to the average person.

Store-and-forward, hierarchical organization, scheduled transmissions, working over dial-up and radio links, everything is there.

There is nothing new to invent, and it was far more reliable than the 10m real-world range of BT5 (not the 1km claimed for lab devices, which aren't commercial phones).

A BT5 mesh only works under well-defined conditions, which usually coincide with the cases where you don't actually need it.

MrDrDr• 6 months ago

Thanks for posting - this is really interesting. An idea perhaps whose time may have come. Out of interest (no criticism implied) but do/have you use this tech? and if so what was your experience?

ssl-33• 6 months ago

FidoNet has a lot of it solved, for sure. But doesn't it rely upon pre-configured paths between nodes in order to handle message routing?

If so, then: Wouldn't it fall down completely when operating in the ever-shifting and inherently disorganized environment that a sea of pocket supercomputers represents?

barbs• 6 months ago

It looks like Secure Scuttlebutt may also be relevant here, as it was designed with unreliable networks in mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt

j1elo2• 6 months ago

This has released tags since back to July 2025. Does anyone know if it's being actively used to exfiltrate news from Iran right now? (if someone's been living under a rock: [1][2])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46667491

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573384

budududuroiu4• 6 months ago

Not sure about bitchat, but Briar is being used in Iran right now. https://byteiota.com/briar-offline-mesh-when-internet-shutdo...

Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.

JumpCrisscross4• 6 months ago

Briar is being used in Iran right now

Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.

throwaway7584392• 6 months ago

Living under the rock of meaningless political theater is not great [1]

[1] Washington’s War on Iran: The Importance of Defending Information Space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJm4zwZZHY

kbouck• 6 months ago

Clever name that changes depending on where you put the space

j1elo2• 6 months ago

What are good file transfer apps that can be used in similar scenarios? (to be clear about the usage model: communications on a plane)

* I see LocalSend and LANDrop frequently suggested on HN but in my experience they rely on having a central Wifi router. No good.

* Android's QuickShare comes included by default, but it's buggy. Just yesterday it failed on me (I'm on an uncommunicated boat): it was defaulting to Bluetooth, so I had to reboot both phones to finally make it work over Wifi Direct. Not to speak about the "oh damn, you have an iPhone" scenario. Not ideal.

Anything else? (to remark: for airplane-like situations so no access to Internet and no central router)

fc417fc8027• 6 months ago

Unfortunately most P2P wireless solutions are likely to be somewhat buggy, at least in my experience. WiFi and Bluetooth chipsets are often "quirky". I will often lose the ability to ssh into my laptop across WiFi until I go to the laptop and poke the network from it. KDEConnect often temporarily loses sight of my phone, yet it still reports being connected to WiFi. Stuff like that.

boozelclark• 6 months ago

This is an interesting enhancement using Meshtastic to expand the range of bitchat https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/discussions/7542

cedws3• 6 months ago

My fantasy is a P2P network that people can use from their everyday devices. The internet is becoming far too controlled, we need an alternative that is harder to monitor and censor.

mytailorisrich• 6 months ago

I don't think Meshtatic, or any Lora-based solutions operating in regulated spectrum, works in practice for chat while also abiding by the rules. In Europe (868MHz) and the US (915MHz) the transmissions allowed are so restricted that while you may send alerts you can't really "chat" and even less so in a group chat.

Y_Y2• 6 months ago

Depends what your requirements are. For example, if you don't mind latency and can stay within 100m of the nearest node you can use wifi hosted on phones.

Even without something fancy (e.g WiFi Direct, iptables on a rooted phone) you could have phones alternating between offering a network and promiscuously connecting to offered networks, then routing between these.

It's simple enough that I'd be surprised if nobody has done it, maybe because it's slow and power-hungry? I haven't tested setting up hotspots and switching networks from inside app logic, but afaik it's fine as long as you don't do both at the same time.

edit: Having thought about it for a minute, a DTN over WiFi Direct is probably the way to go. Establishing identity for signing||encryption might be tricky, but if you can arrange that in advance or just yolo it in plain text then should be straightforward. Can't find any prior art though. I'll let Codex have a go and report back.

lazzlazzlazz• 6 months ago

Every time I've logged into Bitchat, nobody appears to be online - across the entire United States.

jaldert• 6 months ago

Same in Iceland, but even when traveling across the world, I never see anyone when trying it.

simonmales• 6 months ago

It's getting movement in tough political environments like Uganda: https://www.archyde.com/bitchat-surges-to-1-in-uganda-amid-p...

And natural disasters like in Jamaica https://www.gadgets360.com/cryptocurrency/news/bitchat-becom...

hexagonwin• 6 months ago

Its soaring popularity highlights how decentralised technology can offer a vital communication lifeline during natural disasters. Its soaring popularity demonstrates how decentralised tools can provide a critical communication lifeline when natural disasters knock out traditional infrastructure.

seems like the second article is written by AI

canterburry• 6 months ago

Finally...a dedicated app to bitch at people.

szszrk• 6 months ago

Now I cannot unsee it...

A bit unfortunate naming, indeed.

askvictor• 6 months ago

A bit like expert sex change.

pipo2342• 6 months ago

OMG you're right. I cannot unsee..

sgt3• 6 months ago

Thought this could have been used in Iran but I guess it was a bit immature still.

maelito• 6 months ago

Does not work without Google Play services. No-go.

senchalover232• 6 months ago

bithcat is out for like.. a long time. Why is hyping now?

senchalover232• 6 months ago

Bitchat is out for a while now, why is hyoping now?

anidsiam• 6 months ago

Jack Dorsey is definitely a smart guy, I believe there is a big reason behind it. I wish he will surprise us to make it capable global communication. But my question is how long it will take to work it for a long distance?

Kina2• 6 months ago

I think he’s just a guy who got a lot of money who can pay people to implement his sometimes weird, sometimes useful, often ill-conceived obsession with decentralization and a very lame version of “freedom”.

Like, he quit BlueSky because he wanted it to be completely unmoderated which is, frankly, asinine. His view of what “censorship” means exists in a world along with spherical cows and no bad actors.

pbiggar2• 6 months ago

We did an evaluation on Bitchat as we had also built our own and needed to choose whether to continue with it or look at Bitchat instead. In the end, after the evaluation we chose Bitchat. See more here https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...

kkfx• 6 months ago

My verdict is negative: BT has too limited a range. Can you communicate in a crowd? Yes, sure, the density of BT hosts can be very high, but can you imagine a crowd in the street communicating via messages instead of face-to-face? Can it handle communications for an entire city of a few million people with useful overhead? I strongly doubt it.

We've had interesting mesh network experiments in the past (maybe some here remember Fonera), and some are trying on various bands, e.g. World Mobile, but none of these can realistically work unless prepared and deployed in advance, which happens through public choices, meaning public networks built to be truly resilient, rather than centrally controlled.

So, while technically interesting, they are not realistically usable in civil war situations. Instead, it's interesting to think about how vulnerable surveillance devices are in these situations, like modern connected cars and smartphones, which can operate a mesh centrally, for example, to guide and block cars at strategic road junctions and centrally acquire location data from the "meat-bots" carrying smart devices with them.

If I were a citizen in a civil war, I'd be afraid of the connected car and would stay far away from my smartphone if I decided to take action. If I were the ruler of a country that can't make its own cars and smart devices, I'd block them by any means necessary due to the serious national security risk they pose.

We need open hardware and FLOSS imposed by law, making it ILLEGAL to sell black boxes and fund research for verifiable hardware. Not to believe that the latest mesh app is good for anything without giving a single thought to real-world use.

rm3010• 6 months ago

I'd consider this app a proof of concept, with limited practical applications.

The story of using Bluetooth in a cruise ship to chat with family sounds like it’s pushing the limits of physics; communication in those conditions is highly unreliable. Most of our phones have onboard a class 2 device (the lower range, 10-20m), the real world has walls to reduce the range, and a cruise ship's metal structure creates a Faraday cage effect.

In case of protests, a jammer will silence all devices.

Anyway, I was thinking that in extreme cases we could modify our devices for communication at a community level—for example, creating a Wi-Fi mesh network with routers, or some other long-range protocol (e.g., LoRa).

kelseydh• 6 months ago

I've heard about technology like this for over a decade. Have never encountered a use case (even no coverage at music festivals) where it once became viable.

consoleable• 6 months ago

Hopefully, the browser Bluetooth API will receive more support (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...). Web-based PWAs are more suitable because apps are subject to app store censorship.

curtisblaine• 6 months ago

Can PWAs run (and interact with Bluetooth) in the background? Edit: no they can't, so PWA would be not very useful at this.

twism2• 6 months ago

Could still work in some cases where a certain amount of users are in and out of the website and in proximity e.g. protests

nubinetwork• 6 months ago

Considering that my Bluetooth headset disconnects when I even think about looking at my microwave, I can't trust Bluetooth any further than 10 feet...

If you want kilometers of range in wide open air, give anything lora based a try.

ddtaylor• 6 months ago

I am using Briar and Session right now for this.

Jack makes cool stuff, but I fell off BlueSky and I have little desire to engage with the "community" on there. It's very echo-chambery like every social media and I feel it's mostly identical to X or Truth just a different echo chamber. It seemed like BlueSky was being sold as a solution to what happened with Twitter and I feel like it didn't make true on it's promise.

Angostura2• 6 months ago

I work at a hospital. I think this could be a really interesting emergency fallback system in the event that there is catastrophic failure of mobile, bleep and WiFi

Philip-J-Fry• 6 months ago

This feels like something Apple should do with iPhones.

Find My and air tags was already a huge success because of the ubiquitous nature of iPhones.

Apple could add this to iPhone, sell it as privacy focussed. Let you message anyone in your iMessage contacts with a new bubble colour. Propagate over Bluetooth when you don't have internet.

I can see a snazzy Apple reveal for this showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium, and then for the meme factor, 2 astronauts on a space walk. It writes itself.

spockz2• 6 months ago

Wouldn’t that bring the wrath of mobile carriers around the world on their back?

If there is a decentralised system that doesn’t require infrastructure , what is left to monetise?

engineer_222• 6 months ago

what is left to monetise?

Low latency, high bandwidth

mikehotel• 6 months ago

Apple/Google have the financial brawn to push a disrupting technology into more common use. And this is not encumbered by any restrictive licenses.

api• 6 months ago

Range? Bandwidth? A solution like that would work only in limited circumstances. It’d be neat but no replacement for cellular.

hapticmonkey• 6 months ago

Then Google can copy it with a series of a dozen product launches and closures over the next decade.

Google BT Chat. Android B Chat. Google Relay.

And Microsoft can get on board, too. With Microsoft Teams Decentralised For School and Work.

cannonpalms• 6 months ago

I doubt the equities analysts would appreciate this as much as a tech nerd would. It'd be seen as a step backwards and evidence of having no clue which way the world is heading.

contracertainty• 6 months ago

Unfortunately iPhones aren't ubiquitous outside their home market. It would have to be on Android to be really useful in the places this would be really useful, i.e. places where regimes turn off the internet when things go badly for them (current situation in the US notwithstanding). That's not to say iPhones shouldn't have it, I'm all for that.

elAhmo2• 6 months ago

Home market for iPhones is the whole world.

_heimdall• 6 months ago

The US, and likely Chinese, government(s) have too much potential leverage over Apple. I wouldn't trust that Apple would do this securely, or that the government would allow them to release it.

big-and-small• 6 months ago

Apple just gonna disable it for China like any other privacy feature.

hwillis• 6 months ago

Idk that there's much of a privacy sell vs. messages being encrypted. In the end users are just trusting Apple to actually be securing messages; they aren't going to love that they are trusting dozens of strangers instead of telecoms. Plus, police etc. already snoop on phones by spoofing cell tower relays anyway.

Showcasing it's use on a cruise ship, in a packed stadium

Stadiums will still max out the pipe out of the local area, so I suspect it wouldn't help much. Festivals and cruise ships, where you want to reach people who are nearby (and at a festival, you might even have a good idea via gps which peers are better) are in desperate need of this and idk why apple didnt solve it years ago.

jayd16• 6 months ago

Seems extremely niche for a keynote but a lot of the Apple Watch Ultra features seem niche too. Who knows, I guess it could happen.

woah• 6 months ago

This has absolutely nothing to do with privacy.

dim13• 6 months ago

Finally I see some people around. Was pretty lonely, as it launched.

Tooster• 6 months ago

Cap your html bodies to 75ch width for comfortable reading. Minimalism doesn't conflict with nice layout and it's 1 line of css.

russnes2• 6 months ago

Why are these apps on bluetooth? I'm surprised no one has come up with a way to transmit data over local ad hoc wifi networks, it must surely be more simple if you could make some sort of transient hot spot

erlend_sh• 6 months ago

Bluetooth works most reliably across all devices (within its limited range), but all these p2p apps are indeed moving towards multi-transport support to diversify and widen the connectivity grid: https://hackmd.io/@grjte/bitchat-wifi-aware

russnes2• 6 months ago

Has Signal ever considered implementing any sort of peer to peer message propagation?

StephenMelon• 6 months ago

The problem with the App Store model is that the app could just be switched off by the powers that be. It would be better if something like this could be built into the OS. If one decentralised use case took off, then there could be other applications, like hosting the internet archive, wikipedia or LLMs, or digital cash. Might need waystations to get into rural areas but it sounds like the best long term way to secure the free internet.

brk2• 6 months ago

It's a neat concept, but in critical scenarios where you are trying to distribute information because traditional wireless methods are down, methods like this can make it easy for users to be targeted via RF transmissions.

Hard to imagine things like this getting much beyond the "cute" stage.

rm3010• 6 months ago

The project is interesting, the concept too, the idea of indipendent communication tools also.

I'll tell you a story.

Usain Bolt, the world 100/200m recordman, is not faster than cheeta. He needs a motorbike or a car to be beat a cheeta. But even with a car or motorbike is unlikely is going to overtak a cheeta on the ground of savannah.

This to tell you are thinking about optimizations of a system while you need to choose the right system for the environment.

A 433 MHz based link and a strong modulation is much suitable solution than a BT class 2 device included in the phone.

And here the real hack, most of phones has an integrated FM receiver, higher sensibility than BT, a simple FM transmitter (88-108 MHz) and problem solved.

deknos3• 6 months ago

but for that to work, you need to attach an antenna, no? and where do i get such an FM transmitter? AND android does not support it in the software level, and there's no protocol for the waves?

rm3010• 6 months ago

To have an FM receiver work on a phone, you do need an antenna, the wired headphones serve that purpose perfectly. An FM transmitter is easy to find; you can use the simple 'Jack-to-FM' adapters designed for car radios, or much better, a USB SDR (which can range from a few kHz to GHz).

Regarding the 'protocol for the waves,' you'll need to play with modulation. That’s the fun part. In technical literature, there are many well-defined modulations (like AFSK or FSK) with clear suggested applications for low-SNR environments.

As for Android support, I have no idea. I understand that in this thread, 'free' sounds like 'freedom,' but freedom has a cost. The freedom of communication requires investment: in hardware, software, and the time to learn the physics of the environment.

deknos3• 6 months ago

is there an actual real good comparison of bitchat vs. briar from all sides? protocols, cryptography, supplychain, which software stack, usability and so on?

JulianHart• 6 months ago

This would've been useful during the Iran shutdowns last week. Bluetooth mesh is one of the few things that keeps working when carriers go dark.

dominicrose• 6 months ago

The regime in Iran has so much to hide it's unlikely that they will enable unsupervised international communication ever again. Other countries don't seem ready to do anything about it.

Kapura• 6 months ago

choosing to build an application on top of bluetooth is like saying, "we've constructed a highway over the most stable terrain known to man: volcanic marshes prone to seasonal flooding."

how do you know when the messaging app is broken, and how do you know when bluetooth is just exercising its ability to hate mankind?

coffeebeqn• 6 months ago

What else would they use? This is for when your government has turned off all sensible networks.

fnands• 6 months ago

Funny, but I think you're missing the point here.

This is not meant to be an efficient, every day messaging platform.

It's for people who are afraid of the government turning off the internet/cell network (kinda justified if you live in Iran or Uganda), or those networks going offline due to natural disasters (see Jamaica)

atwrk• 6 months ago

Pronouncing this out loud I wonder whether the name has been chosen on purpose for the marketing effect: "Where's my bitchat"

devin-2030• 6 months ago

Headline made me think of FidoNet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

alecco2• 6 months ago

Meshtastic + budget kit ($10-$35) is way better. BlueTooth alone is kind of useless. It's max ~100 meters/yards vs 2-20 km (12 miles). And the community is great.

NoiseBert692• 6 months ago

Meshtastic has a reliability problem. We often cannot get beyond one hop - and our network isn't too loose nor too dense (60 stations).

Cross test with Meshcore doesn't show any issues. Chats over 5 hops have almost a 100% success rate.

Long time I avoided MC because of its closed source client - but a Opensource Flutter app for Apple/iPhone is slowly getting usable and stable. (https://github.com/zjs81/meshcore-open)

soldeace• 6 months ago

Honest question, as I've just recently started fiddling with Meshtastic: could it be that the mesh is not set up correctly for a dense environment? (e.g. using LongFast rather than MediumFast, or not having more nodes configured as client_mute?) I know the conditions may be wildly different, but just as an example, the guy in this video says he saw no big issues on a hamvention with 300+ nodes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBfHAPpjtk4

alecco2• 6 months ago

Sounds good. But there are ~10x fewer nodes in my area :(

ifh-hn• 6 months ago

It doesn't matter how hard I try to see: bit-chat, my brain defaults to: bitch-at, and if I scan it: bitch-hat.

modeless5• 6 months ago

It's criminal that cell phones are bristling with incredibly advanced radio technology and yet they are by law not allowed to communicate directly with each other over a distance of more than a couple hundred meters without assistance from a licensed and centrally controlled base station. Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission. This is a choice our governments have made, not something inherent to the technology.

digiown2• 6 months ago

Will the walkie talkies work if there are hundreds in a small area all transmitting data with each other? Besides, there's just not that much bandwidth there.

modeless5• 6 months ago

Walkie talkies as licensed today wouldn't because they are required by law to use exclusively stone-age radio technology. But modern unlicensed radio technology is incredibly good at sharing scarce 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Sometimes devices do interfere with each other, but they remain useful and they are far better at sharing than any expert would have predicted years ago. Let the radio engineers try.

rm3010• 6 months ago

The smartphone is just an advanced walkie-talkie, currently limited only by the mobile operator, the law, the radio chipset, and the OS.

In a true emergency, who can stop you from modifying that architecture? Once you treat the device as an independent radio node (using its DSP power to run custom modems) you can establish a mesh network with a range of several kilometers.

We have a '4x4 car in our pockets; we’ve just been conditioned to treat it like a toy.

jansper39• 6 months ago

Personally, the additional complexity and overheads required for a P2P phone network is not worth while and I'm not sure it would fix that many problems that haven't already been fixed with walkie talkies.

foltik3• 6 months ago

Not worthwhile? “It’s too hard” isn’t a great argument for why our phones should just become useless during power outages, natural disasters, ..

lxgr11• 6 months ago

Not worthwhile to who?

The point is exactly that everybody is carrying a phone, but almost nobody is carrying a walkie-talkie. And why should I carry one more thing? My smartphone has already replaced my music player, camera...

jonhohle• 6 months ago

It’s one less thing to have to buy and carry and charge and configure and remember and get others to do the same.

lormayna4• 6 months ago

A walkie-talkie requires a big antenna and consume a lot more power than a cellphone.

lxgr11• 6 months ago

Both not true.

Both European PMR446 and the US FRS are limited to 0.5 W; GSM uses four times that. There are walkie-talkies with very small antennas too. The limiting factor is line-of-sight, in any case.

If you're fine with less than real-time audio, you can get much, much smaller and low power.

squarefoot2• 6 months ago

A small USB pluggable module that supports LoRa plus an app using Codec2 or similar low rate codec for voice encoding could fill the gap, although having it bundled with the phone would make it a lot less cumbersome to use. For non phone portable solutions, the LilyGo T-Deck Plus/Pro come to mind, but they're not phones so that would imply a 2nd device to carry around.

londons_explore• 6 months ago

Yet compared to the 5G radio that can do gigabit speed and 20+ kilometers of range....

vrighter• 6 months ago

why does everyone keep suggesting lora for stuff like this? It could support one gsm connection. Not one per person, but one

lxgr11• 6 months ago

Meanwhile a $10 walkie talkie using primitive stone-age radio technology can go many miles with zero infrastructure, but by law is not allowed to be used for data transmission.

Is this even true?

I still have two Gotennas from before they pivoted to military use cases, and they were legal to use both in the US and in Europe (on different bands auto-configured via GPS, as far as I remember).

REI also currently stocks at least one set of walkie talkies [1] that can relay short messages from smartphones via Bluetooth.

[1] https://www.rei.com/product/240874/motorola-talkabout-t803-2...

modeless5• 6 months ago

Wow, you're right, data is technically allowed on FRS frequencies. I didn't realize that. It's not unrestricted though. There are a lot of regulations that constrain how FRS radios can work, much more than for 2.4 Ghz.

oldgregg• 6 months ago

Get bought out by military control grid --> Instantly kill popular consumer devices.

bilsbie2• 6 months ago

Ham frequencies would work even better?

roboman• 6 months ago

Please site the relevant sections of this supposed law you claim exists.

shimman• 6 months ago

Or even better, where is the tech that can do this disregarding the law? Let's not act that something being illegal never stopped it from achieving mass adoption.

catlifeonmars5• 6 months ago

Check your sources. The law you claim exists… which one is it?

mannyv• 6 months ago

File this under "lies that someone said on the interwebs."

ianburrell• 6 months ago

It isn't a law thing, but I'm disappointed that LTE Direct didn't go anywhere. That let's cell phone talk to each other over range up a km. The problem is that there LTE Direct requires implementation in the radio firmware, and the companies only did it for government phones. There is also 5G Device-to-Device and I haven't found out if that is supported more widely. There would also need to be frequency allocation, something CBRS (3.5GHz) would work but would be nice to get something with longer range.

You aren't going to get longer ranges with phone, the power and antenna are too limited. Walkie-walkie have bigger antennas (the stubby FRS sort of suck) and more power. Also, walkie-talkie don't have much bandwidth so the data rates would suck.

salawat• 6 months ago

It's a business model thing, which seems to supplant law these days. Can't meter P2P. Intermediation to prevent usurpation of network effects is the name of the game in the modern day. No one will say that, but it's the quiet part left explicitly unsaid. The negative space of the incentive structure, if you will.

dzhiurgis• 6 months ago

A alternative example of this is how Apple doesn't have a way to browse your iPhone's gallery without syncing to their super slow iCloud first.

Aloha• 6 months ago

There is nothing stopping a phone manufacturer from putting a 900 MHz ISM radio in their hardware.

Also, the walkie talkies certainly can legally do data transmission.

coppsilgold• 6 months ago

Many WiFi chips can be put into monitor mode (process all the data packets it can detect over the air) and inject packets for transmissions themselves. This pathway is typically unoptimized and would offer poor bandwidth but it is enough for text and audio.

You would need root to do this, and implement your own protocol on top of it with forward error correcting codes.

powersjcb• 6 months ago

I’ve been tangentially involved in experimenting with Meshtastic and trying to scale it for large events like Burning Man, on the order of 2000–3000 nodes on a single frequency.

Node to node mesh communication is cool and it works surprisingly well at small scale, but the moment we brought high powered repeaters online the difference was night and day. Coverage, reliability, and usability all jumped instantly.

It makes the tradeoff really obvious. Mesh is great for bootstrapping and local traffic, but once you care about real data propagation at scale, centralized infrastructure wins almost every time. Airtime is scarce, coordination matters, and having a small number of well placed high sites beats thousands of mediocre relays.

I still think there’s room for novelty P2P protocols, but mostly as an optimization layer on top of infrastructure, not as the foundation. Every time you push on this problem hard enough, you end up rediscovering the client router model for a reason.

modeless5• 6 months ago

Of course there's no reason to use a mesh when infrastructure is available. That's not why a mesh would be useful. But it doesn't even need to be a mesh to be a useful feature. Walkie talkies aren't a mesh and they remain useful.

theshrike793• 6 months ago

On the other hand a "high powered repeater" for Meshtastic is just the same board with a bigger more optimised antenna.

You can get solar powered ones for under 100€ and slap them wherever you want pretty easily. (But please don't unless you know what you're doing, adding useless router nodes makes the network worse, not better)

Buttons840• 6 months ago

HAM radios can transmit data I think. They just can't do encrypted transmissions. (I'm open to correction on this.)

theshrike793• 6 months ago

They _can_, they're just not allowed to. It's a tradeoff, they can use higher transmission frequencies than regular folk, but also have to do it in the open.

elzbardico• 6 months ago

I sometimes wonder if we couldn't have completely different public internet topologies if

a) Wireless local networking was invented and popularized earlier b) We had transitioned earlier to IPV6 or some other protocol with an address space as huge, thus making NAT not as pervasive as it became. b) We didn't have hordes of VCs financing walled gardens and social networks.

modeless5• 6 months ago

It's simpler than that. The only thing that would need to change is spectrum allocation. We need unlicensed spectrum with higher power limits in longer range radio bands. It's a miracle what radio engineers have done with a tiny slice of unlicensed spectrum near 2.4 Ghz. Imagine what they could do with a few unlicensed lower frequency VHF/UHF channels.

digiown2• 6 months ago

I think "wired" (really bundles of optical fiber) will win out anyway due to the vast capacities it can provide. There will always be gaps between populations and to have a reliable link, you will need these dedicated mainlines, which will also help scale datacenters. Perhaps we would have more p2p tools, but the public internet would have a similar topology too if it were to have a similar capacity.

prathje• 6 months ago

There are a lot of old and new mobile applications doing this. If there is anyone doing some research in this space, maybe take a look at our "DisruptaBLE" implementation for delay tolerant networking on embedded devices: https://openreview.net/forum?id=xy3Y6cLOV2

duxup• 6 months ago

Bluetooth range would seem to make this unreliable or useless in many areas?

zhyder• 6 months ago

Love it. Wonder if it's viable for citizen journalism in warzones and areas of civil unrest, with the larger size of photos (and short videos), given the inherently slow transfer rates and battery life implications of going thru multiple hops before Internet-exiting the area that's otherwise Internet-offline. What's the back-of-the-envelope math here on viable bandwidth?

Wifi obviously has higher bandwidth, but I guess it isn't viable as a mesh, or is there any trick with turning on/off hotspots on phones dynamically that'd make it viable? (Afaik older phones made you pick between being a hotspot or being a regular wifi client, but at least some newer ones seem to allow both simultaneously.)

I'm definitely hoping for a future with wider support for C2PA (content credentials on images) on phone cameras to make these photos power citizen journalism. So far Samsung S25 and Pixel 10 support C2PA in the camera hardware: need other phone makers (especially Apple) to get on board already... if you're an iPhone user, please help yell at Apple support etc!

Aside: I registered a domain and plan to build a citizen journalism news feed for such photos (and uncut videos). I see it as the antidote to Instagram et al's feeds that're full of AI slop (and plenty of fakery even before AI-generated imagery got big). And it's essential to truth, democracy and ultimately (maybe I'm too idealistic here) peace. Aside to the aside: wish some of us techies banded together to build "peace tech" as a new sector in tech, DM if interested in brainstorming or working together.

thoughtpalette• 6 months ago

Bring back Cybiko's, we can message there instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko

johntash• 6 months ago

Oh man, I remember these. A modern version would be pretty cool.

bilsbie2• 6 months ago

I open bitchat once a week. Someday I’ll find someone nearby and we’ll be best friends.

ENadyr• 6 months ago

Whatever happened to VolkFi? A YC company that was making a decentralized phone, discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19437963

dejongh• 6 months ago

Let's all install this and form a fail-safe (if you are in a populated area) and unregulated mesh. I would love to see how far into the Amazonas or Greenland it works.

ninalanyon3• 6 months ago

Without store and forward you will rarely be able to get messages out of the local area.

WhyNotHugo• 6 months ago

Isn’t this similar to Brair?

AFAIK, Brair relays messages through Bluetooth but also through Tor if possible.

31337Logic• 6 months ago

I love Briar for this use-case.

jadbox• 6 months ago

What about a desktop web app? Using web standards, you can access bluetooth now (to some degree).

h4kunamata• 6 months ago

Reading some comments, people do not understand.....

Anything that does not involve having govs and the middle man, will never be allowed, legally.

Long frequency radios, phone-to-phone communication, decentralized payment systems, anything. If the gov cannot track you or cannot make you pay tax for it, it will never become popular for obvious reasons.

It is legal in 2026 for Sony and others to delete digital content you bought and paid tax for because it doesn't belong to you, yet, it is illegal to download such content via torrent. That tells you a lot.

tmvnty• 6 months ago

Someone build a commercial wrapper around this, and sell it at (huge) music festivals as alternative message tools???

freakynit• 6 months ago

All comments analyzed by LLM: https://hn-discussions.top/bitchat-bluetooth-p2p-messaging/

A decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth

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