If you’re wondering what Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has been up to after founding Bluesky, he’s actually been working on a project to offer offline communication through Bluetooth patterns. On X this week, he announced Bitchat, a Bluetooth mesh chat app.
With a TestFlight beta currently underway, he said the app is in review to be published in the App Store. What makes this app unique is giving users the ability to securely converse using Bluetooth connectivity, which means you don’t need to worry about having a cell signal. As long as you’re around 300 meters from someone, you can communicate.
These are the main features of Bitchat in its current state:
- Offline Communication: Works without internet thank to Bluetooth mesh networking
- E2E Encryption: All messages are encrypted with Curve25519 + AES-GCM
- Extended Range: Message peers reaching 300m+ of distance
- Favorites System: You can store-and-forward messages for favorites indefinitely
- Mentions: Use @nickname to notify specific users
- Rooms: It’s possible to create #rooms for topic-based conversations
- Password Rooms: Secure rooms with passwords and AES encryption.
Dorsey also revealed the app’s privacy features. Notably, Bitchat doesn’t collect data — it creates a new ID each session, and you can triple tap the Bitchat logo to instantly clear all data.
While this doesn’t appear to be the reason that Dorsey created the app, I genuinely believe that this will be best way to chat with friends and family members on a plane or other places where you don’t have a good cellular connection.
After all, sometimes you just want to share something quickly without texting, and none of the current messaging apps can accomplish that for me. As a result, iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and other standard chat apps aren’t always the best bet.
