We forked bitchat. Here's what we changed

Nobars is a fork of bitchat, which is in the public domain. We did not invent Bluetooth mesh messaging and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we did was take a protocol that worked and build the product that a person at a festival, in a storm, or on a plane could actually be handed.

What we kept

The wire format, the flooding rules, the store-and-forward behaviour, and the end-to-end encryption. Interoperability matters here more than almost anywhere else, because the value of the mesh is the number of phones in it. A Nobars phone and a bitchat phone in the same crowd are both relays.

What we rebuilt

• Four tabs instead of a command line. The protocol was approachable; the interface was not.
• Adding friends in person. Stand next to someone, scan once, and that chat is tied to that exact phone forever.
• Nearby, as a map rather than a list, because the question is always “who is around me right now”.
• Offline AI, running on the device, which upstream does not do.
• A duty-cycled radio schedule that cut idle battery use by roughly two thirds in our tests.