Jack Dorsey has made a Bluetooth-based messaging app that doesn’t require internet
At the weekend, the Twitter cofounder unveiled the beta version of “Bitchat” — an encrypted, decentralized messaging service built on... Bluetooth.
However you spent your Fourth of July weekend, it probably wasn’t as productive as Jack Dorsey’s (or, for that matter, Joey Chestnut’s).
On Sunday, the Twitter cofounder and ex-CEO announced that he’d successfully completed his “weekend project” of learning about Bluetooth mesh networks — and created a beta version of “Bitchat,” a new encrypted messaging app able to function entirely via Bluetooth, without the need for internet connection, cell service, phone numbers, or emails.
Dorsey’s “personal experiment” works by connecting users’ phones via local Bluetooth clusters, allowing messages to be sent between devices. Then, “bridge” devices that connect overlapping clusters are used to stretch the mesh network over a greater distance.
Privacy, please
Dorsey has long been a fan of decentralized communications, playing a major role in the development of social networking apps Damus and Bluesky, and his new app’s peer-to-peer encrypted messaging will also rival Meta-owned WhatsApp — without the requirements of identifiable accounts or data collection.
What really separates Bitchat, though, is its use of Bluetooth to keep it functioning offline, similar to mesh messaging apps used during the 2019 Hong Kong protests, per CNBC. While Bluetooth technology isn’t anything new, it’s still impressively prescient in the modern tech world.
Long in the tooth
Based on developments made at Nokia-owned Ericsson in 1994, the first Bluetooth device hit the market in 1999 — the same year that the first camera phone was released.
With a name that started as a reference to King Harald, who united Denmark and Norway, and a logo resembling Nordic runes for his initials, Bluetooth connected computers, phones, and gadgets with wireless transfer capabilities at breakneck speed in the decades to come. In 2000, an estimated 800,000 Bluetooth-enabled devices were shipped; by 2020, this number had multiplied 5,125x over to 4.1 billion, per company reports.
There are very few technologies that are still growing after 30-plus years... but, despite contracting slightly in 2024, Bluetooth looks to have managed it, with the company projecting that shipments will near 8 billion by 2029.
