Banned in India — #1 in France & Jamaica — it still spreads, phone to phone
Banned in India — #1 in France & Jamaica — it still spreads, phone to phone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The internet dies. Your chat doesn’t.
Your phone links straight to the phones around you — no tower, no SIM, no account, no cost
Every phone in between becomes a relay for your words — up to 7 hops of pure Bluetooth
Message for a friend who walked away? It hitches a ride in nearby phones until it finds them
Internet back? The same chat reaches the whole world — one app, both worlds
via Nostr relays nobody owns
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Your door
Your door| your phone | your door |
|---|---|
 Android 8+ |
GitHub install file — the store door moved here, checksum on every release |
 iPhone / Mac |
App Store — iOS 16+ |
 check before install |
bitchat.free — the only real site; copies circle the rest |
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Make the mesh live — 4 moves
Make the mesh live — 4 moves1 Allow Location — Android hides Bluetooth scanning behind it, the mesh looks silent without it
2 Battery → Unrestricted — phone brands kill background apps by brand, per-brand fix: dontkillmyapp.com
3 Join the same channel — password rooms are sealed rooms, strangers never appear as missed messages
4 Screen on when it matters — a pocketed phone sleeps its radio, the crowd test is table-first
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Already battle-tested
Already battle-tested
France, Oct 2026 — riots + a 10-hour network outage → #1 most-downloaded app
Jamaica, Hurricane Melissa — ~80% of the island offline → #1 again; shelters pinned for late-comers
receipt → Decrypt
India ordered it out of the stores, Oct 2026 → it jumps the wall, installing itself phone-to-phone
receipt → TechCrunch
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The honest strip
Crowd range = tens of metres, the makers say so themselves — more phones running it = more range
A stable ID by design — nearby radios can follow it; the whitepaper says so (paper)
Swap phones = identity gone, by design — keys never leave the device, favorites re-added face to face
June 2026 audit: 3 critical flaws, all fixed — run a fresh build, update when it asks (receipt)
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📦 Level it up — the parts nobody tells you
- The ban-buster move: any phone that has the app can beam the install file to the next phone over Bluetooth — no store, no GitHub, no internet, the chain keeps growing
Trust the file, not the store: every release ships a checksum list, independent machines build identical files, and Obtainium auto-installs updates straight from GitHub — no account anywhere- Your drawer phone = a free 24/7 relay tower: charger + battery exemption + stay-awake-while-charging, and it forwards the neighbourhood’s messages while you sleep
Kilometre hops exist: a ~$27 LoRa radio board one-click-flashes into a bridge that carries your chat across a city-scale radio mesh (open source, MIT)
Fill BitChat’s holes with its cousins: Knit = live voice calls over the same recipe · Meshenger = video calls over a hotspot · LocalSend = files between any phones
The blackout kit: Organic Maps (offline navigation) + Kiwix (whole Wikipedia, offline) — pair both with the mesh and a dead network stops mattering
Armour is already there: online relays can ride Tor, location rooms use throwaway keys, and a triple-tap wipes everything instantly
Install it before the day you need it — surge downloads land exactly when the stores go silent
Free forever — public-domain code, no account, no number, no cost.
The whole protocol, open for anyone to read: whitepaper
!