It's not about you being in bluetooth range of the person you want to talk to, it's about all the people sitting in between you both that pass the message along without touching the internet.

So you can be on a cargo ship, or on a remote island, with 20 other people and all use chat. If 1 person has internet, then you can all chat globally as well.

It's the same basic method of how airtags work. Everyone with an iPhone connects to the airtag and passes data to Apple. It's just done in the background, so users don't ever notice.

No one has got it right yet though. Being apple only, he hasn’t either.

None of them cross the line yet to be “good enough” in practice for all the use cases of an offline messenger. Briar is probably the best, but not useful if even one of your group is on iOS.

There are plenty of situations where that’s useful, especially if you can have group chats with images. Think airplanes, weddings, concerts, sports arenas. And if you have meshing and store and forward when nodes are moving around, you can cover a large area that may not have internet. It’s a legitimate tool that no one has done right yet - and as apple only, this is t yet either.

That's a good point. And to add to it, I've tried using Briar as an emergency option if there's no Internet. And there seems to be a massive flaw in that scenario: you need the Internet to authenticate yourself on the app. So if there's no Internet it's useless. I just tried switching off WiFi and 5G on my phone and yup, can't log in, so can't use it.

For all those little bitches.

Thanks, I did not realise that. So this app is for Mac to Mac communication only. If seems for briar you need to run a server still or messages will get lost between mobile users. How does this new app solve that problem? On mobile phones disconnects will happen regularly as network coverage changes and different network towers connect and disconnect when you are on the move.
You might as well spin up your own xmpp server at that point, as that protocol is tried and tested for over 20 years and very lightweight and battery friendly as well...

One thing I personally like more about this than about Briar - routing of messages.

It seems Briar exchanges state of the groups with the neighboring devices, they with their neighbors, and so on.

That might take a few iterations (thus delay) to propagate a message from, say, one side of the crowd to another, and leave different members with different state all the time.

While here, apparently, messages are routed further immediately. From my own toying around - not the best thing too, but initiating synchronization by sender\relay and not by recipient seems sane.

Maybe should rewrite the toy to be nicer. It seems to be closer to real world things than I thought.

I don't know how to do that

In the context of the US fascist dictatorship and Apple being the dominant smartphone there, starting with Apple makes sense.

If it can be done within Apples curated monopoly, it will be technically possible on Android (probably).

In this context I think "crypto" means your message is encrypted across hops, not that you have to pay to send/receive messages.

Signal used to work this way and I'm still mad they dropped SMS.

We already have Briar. I don't get why Jack Dorsey is trying to get into the messaging space so hard. He also bankrolls SimpleX Chat if anyone is familiar with that platform

Phone makers need to add LoRa radios to phones. Something like this would be more useful then.

It depends on the VPN client, doesn't it? I use iptables to route everything through a proxy except local host and proxied connections