Bitchat

Every major internet blackout since mid-2025, Madagascar, Nepal, Indonesia, Uganda, Iran, has produced a download spike for the same app: Bitchat, a Bluetooth mesh messenger Jack Dorsey built with no user accounts, no central servers, no parent company, and deliberately no way to monetize any of it.

Launch, then a fast-arriving security problem

Dorsey posted about the project on X on July 6, 2025, calling it a weekend build with “IRC vibes” running over Bluetooth mesh. Demand outpaced everything immediately, the TestFlight beta hit Apple’s 10,000-tester ceiling within hours, but the code’s security hadn’t caught up to the attention. Within days, Supernetworks researcher Alex Radocea found a way to impersonate other users through a man-in-the-middle flaw in the identity system, and Dorsey responded by adding a disclaimer to the GitHub repo admitting the app hadn’t been through external security review. Trail of Bits backed up the finding with its own published analysis on July 18, 2025. About ten days after that, the app reached Apple’s App Store proper, on July 28 and 29, 2025.

Where the downloads come from

What built Bitchat’s user base wasn’t the launch, it was each subsequent blackout. Madagascar’s Gen Z protests added roughly 70,000 downloads in a single week in September 2025; Nepal’s social media ban that same month drove daily downloads from about 3,300 up to nearly 50,000 within a week; Indonesia saw a similar bump around the same time. The biggest spike came in January 2026, when Ugandan opposition figure Bobi Wine told supporters to install the app ahead of a government-timed shutdown around the election: one developer put Uganda downloads north of 400,000 by January 5, while Ugandan press reported more than 1.7 million by January 7, two figures that don’t reconcile and no audited number resolves. Iran saw its own comparable surge that same month amid ongoing blackouts. By February 2026, the pattern had drawn a different kind of response: China had Apple pull the app from its App Store entirely, citing rules against services “capable of social mobilization.”

Shipping continued through all of it

None of that unrest slowed the release schedule down. A Nostr relay layer had already been added as an internet-connected fallback option before any of the major blackouts hit; version 1.5.0, out January 14, 2026, brought audio and image sharing over the mesh along with a reworked routing algorithm and Tor connectivity through Arti; and by July 2026 the team had shipped fixes from a full third-party security audit, addressing three critical and seven high-severity findings according to the July 6, 2026 release notes, right alongside a store-and-forward overhaul that landed the next day as version 1.6.0. All of that development happens with no business underneath it: Bitchat is a project of “and Other Stuff,” a nonprofit Dorsey funded with $10 million in July 2025. There’s no company structure, no revenue line, and nobody accountable if support is needed, but also nothing that can run out of money and force a shutdown. One consequence of that structure: it locks in zero as the market price for phone-only mesh messaging, permanently.

Where it stands against this project

Bitchat only confirms delivery on private messages; anything sent to the public mesh goes out as a broadcast with no confirmation at all, whereas this project’s ack-and-relay model confirms delivery across the board. It’s also entirely phone-dependent, so coverage thins out whenever iPhones get backgrounded or a crowd disperses; always-on Windows relay hubs with a dashboard give a venue coverage starting on day one instead, independent of how many phones are nearby at any given moment. Location awareness works differently too: Bitchat’s geohash channels only function with an internet connection back to a Nostr relay, while last-known-location mapping here needs neither the internet nor a relay to work.

What’s genuinely hard to compete with: a founder everyone recognizes, a headline attached to nearly every blackout since mid-2025, a sizable open-source contributor community, shipped media-over-mesh functionality, support for 28 languages, a completed external security audit as of July 2026, and a price, free, that nothing here can undercut.