Berkanan

Berkanan is what a technically sound mesh app looks like when almost nobody is standing close enough to use it. One developer, Zsombor Szabo, wrote the iOS app, open-sourced the protocol beneath it a year later, drew a wave of press, and moved on, all before it had built any real user base. Its sharpest spike of demand arrived years too late to matter: in 2022, with the app already long dormant, Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine pushed installs up more than tenfold and won an endorsement from the Ukrainian government, and even that changed nothing about the project’s trajectory. The repository still compiles today. What it always lacked was a critical mass of people running it in the same place at the same time.

A one-person project, on purpose

The entire thing rested on one person’s time and one person’s architectural bet. Szabo funded and built it himself, aimed narrowly at Bluetooth group chat for the places towers give out, on planes, at festivals, in dead zones, with no server anywhere in the design. The consequential move came in June 2019, about nine months after the app’s September 2018 TechCrunch debut: he split the protocol out into a standalone, MIT-licensed package, BerkananSDK, wagering that other developers would embed it and build the density he could never reach alone. That wager did not pay off. Commits tapered to a stop, the last meaningful one on March 6, 2020, the same year Szabo took a Head of Engineering role at Covid Watch and turned his attention to the TCN exposure-notification protocol, which effectively closed Berkanan as an active concern.

Where development stands

A check on July 8, 2026 found BerkananSDK sitting at 219 stars and 4 unresolved issues, with nothing committed since 2020 and zero activity across the whole 2024-2026 window. BerkananKit, the library that handled the original app’s Bluetooth plumbing, carries a deprecated label on GitHub. The Berkanan Messenger app is technically still downloadable from the App Store, unmaintained as it is, and Szabo himself has since moved again, now working as a staff engineer at Oura. When Bitchat pulled phone-BLE mesh back into the conversation in July 2025, none of that renewed attention reached Berkanan: no fresh commits, no maintained fork, nothing.

The business model that wasn’t

There was no business plan beyond hoping other developers would adopt the SDK free of charge: no distribution strategy, no revenue mechanism, and one person maintaining all of it. The Ukraine spike proved the demand was real, but it landed roughly two years after the project had already gone quiet, well past the point where it could have bootstrapped a working network.

Where it stands against this project

Berkanan’s underlying protocol was never the issue; the problem was that too few people were ever standing close enough to relay a message along. This project attacks that same cold-start density problem differently, with cross-platform support and always-on Windows relay hubs running a dashboard, and it avoids the iOS background-Bluetooth ceiling that trapped Berkanan on Apple devices exclusively. Delivery also works differently: acknowledgment and relay confirm a message arrived somewhere, rather than flooding the network and hoping. Bandwidth goes further too, through dictionary compression rather than Berkanan’s raw 512-byte message cap, and connectivity is treated as optional rather than absent, with last-known-location mapping designed in from day one instead of missing entirely.