BLE Mesh
How it compares

The landscape

Fifteen years of the same dream, profiled honestly: what each project got right, what broke it, and where this one fits. Sourced and dated, refreshed as the category moves.

Phone-only BLE mesh

05 profiles

Our quadrant. Phones only, no dedicated radio.

  1. Berkanan Berkanan is what a technically sound mesh app looks like when almost nobody is standing close enough to use it. dormant
  2. Bitchat Every major internet blackout since mid-2025, Madagascar, Nepal, Indonesia, Uganda, Iran, has produced a download spike for the same app: Bitchat,… active
  3. Briar For five months in 2026, while an internet blackout cut somewhere between 85 and 92 million Iranians off from the outside world (the estimates disa… active-niche
  4. Bridgefy The same academic research group broke Bridgefy's security claims twice, once in 2020 and again in 2022 after the company believed it had fixed the… pivoted
  5. FireChat No mesh app has ever been more famous than FireChat was in the fall of 2014, and none has left less behind. dead

Hardware mesh

03 profiles

Dedicated devices. Range and battery, at the cost of buying hardware.

  1. Beartooth Beartooth's history is a cautionary tale about what happens when marketing outruns lab results by a wide enough margin: one independent field test… active-repositioned
  2. goTenna Of every mesh-hardware company built for hikers and preppers, goTenna is the one that survived by abandoning that market outright, and it got acqui… acquired
  3. Meshtastic Meshtastic answers a question this project doesn't need to ask: what happens to an off-grid mesh network when there's no company left to keep the s… active

Adjacent technologies

01 profiles

The satellite and direct-to-cell layer we sit beneath, not against.

  1. Satellite Messengers and Direct-to-Cell Ask a hiker's spouse what "off-grid safety" means and the answer is never mesh, it's satellite: some way to reach the outside world from a trailhea… current