All news

Release

1.2: rooms, voice notes, and a battery win

Neighbourhood rooms, short voice notes over the mesh, and idle battery use down by a third.

1.2 is the release where Nobars stops being only about the people you already know. Rooms are conversations tied to a place rather than a contact list: the campsite, the carriage, the block. Walk into range and the room is there. Walk out and it stays behind.

Rooms

A room is public to whoever is near enough to hear it, and nothing in a room is end-to-end encrypted, because there is no fixed set of recipients to encrypt to. We say that in the room itself, every time you open a new one, in plain words. Private messages remain private messages.

Voice notes

Up to fifteen seconds, compressed hard, sent in pieces so a note can cross several hops and reassemble at the other end. They are the first thing we have shipped that is genuinely slow over a long mesh path, and they are worth it. A voice at a festival carries information a text never will, starting with whether the person is fine.

34%
Less idle battery use
15s
Maximum voice note
2.1s
Median room join time
  • Nearby now shows relative distance bands rather than a precise position.
  • Blocking is per-device and survives a name change.
  • Delivery receipts stop pending messages from being re-relayed forever.
  • Fixed: a rare crash when Bluetooth was toggled mid-send.
Company

We forked bitchat. Here's what we changed

Same protocol, same mesh, a different product around it. An honest account of what we kept, what we rebuilt, and what we owe upstream.

Devin Park1 min read

Field notes

What a blackout taught us about queues

Twelve hours with no power and no towers in Valencia. The messages that mattered were the ones nobody was awake to receive.

Mara Ellison1 min read

Ready before the signal isn't

Install now, Nobars works the second you open it.