Roadmap
What we're building, and what we're not
Nobars is built in the open. Here is everything on the board, including the things we've decided against.
Shipped
In the App Store today
4Neighbourhood rooms
1.2 — June 2026Conversations tied to a place instead of a contact list. Walk into range, the room is there.
Voice notes over the mesh
1.2 — June 2026Fifteen seconds, chunked so a note can cross several hops and reassemble at the far end.
Offline AI, six models
1.1 — April 2026Open weights, downloaded once, running on the device. Nothing you type leaves the phone.
Longer sealed queues
1.2 — June 2026Messages with nowhere to go now wait twelve hours instead of two, and phones with spare storage carry more for other people.
Building
Being written right now
3Faster rejoin after a gap
1.3 — autumn 2026Come back into range after twenty minutes away and pending messages find you in seconds, not minutes.
A first run that explains the scan
1.3 — autumn 2026The one instruction that mattered in the field: stand next to your friend, scan once, done forever.
Density-aware radio schedule
1.3 — autumn 2026Scan less and relay more when there are dozens of peers in range. Tested in a packed subway car; the battery win is real.
Next
Agreed, not started
3Android
2027The protocol is the same; the radio stack is not. A second platform doubles the size of every crowd, which is the whole game.
Group chats with real membership
1.4Private groups that are encrypted to a known set of people, rather than public rooms open to whoever is near.
Emergency broadcast mode
1.4One sentence, highest priority, longest hop budget, for the blackout case. Rate limited hard so it stays meaningful.
Exploring
We're not sure yet
3Multi-device identity
No dateYour phone and your tablet as one person, without breaking what an in-person scan proves. Hard, and worth doing properly.
Ultra-wideband handoff
No dateNewer phones can find each other with far more precision than Bluetooth. Interesting for Nearby; not a replacement for the mesh.
Bridging to the internet
No dateA phone with signal could carry the field's messages out to the wider network. Powerful, and a privacy decision we won't make quietly.
Things we've decided against
Accounts and a directory
Searching for strangers by name is the feature that turns a messenger into a place to be harassed. Adding people in person stays the only way.
Analytics in the app
No event pipeline, no crash-adjacent fingerprinting, no growth SDK. We learn what's broken by going to festivals and by reading the mail.
Cloud backup of your chats
There is no copy of your conversation anywhere but your phone, and we'd like to keep that sentence true.
Missing something?
The board moves when people write in. Tell us what you needed when the signal went, and it gets read by the people building this.
