I spent Saturday night testing an app that's supposed to work without cell service, and I have complicated feelings about it.
You've probably seen the Hong Kong stuff by now: the protests over the election rules, tens of thousands of people out in the streets since late last week, umbrellas held up against pepper spray. That image is going to be the one everyone remembers. But the thing that actually got my attention as a tech nerd was a smaller story sitting inside the big one: FireChat, this mesh-networking chat app, apparently got downloaded something like 100,000 times in Hong Kong in a single day because people were worried the government might throttle or shut down mobile networks entirely.
FireChat doesnt need a cell tower or even wifi to talk to someone nearby. It uses Bluetooth and Apple's Multipeer Connectivity framework (or wifi direct on Android) to hop your message phone to phone until it finds its target, or just broadcasts it to everyone in range on a public channel. Open Garden built it back in March and it mostly sat around as a novelty for festivals and airplane mode boredom. Then a few hundred thousand people in Hong Kong needed a way to talk that didnt run through infrastructure someone else controls, and suddenly it's the most talked-about app of the week.
So obviously I had to try it, except I dont live anywhere near a protest, so my test case was considerably lower stakes: my friend Dana and I sat at Grady's on 4th, put our phones in airplane mode, and tried to chat with each other across a table.
It worked, technically. Messages went through in a second or two. But here's the thing nobody mentions in the breathless "revolutionary protest tool" writeups: the public rooms are a mess. You cant just message the person across from you privately unless you already have a shared invite code, so we ended up in a "nearby" channel with something like forty strangers, half of them just typing test test test or asking if anyone nearby wanted to trade Pokemon cards (I have no idea why). It felt less like a lifeline and more like CB radio with autocorrect. Which, fine, that's kind of the point in a real emergency — you dont need it to be elegant, you need it to work when everything else doesnt. But as a Saturday night novelty it was mostly just us squinting at a wall of nonsense from people three tables over.
Battery drain was rough too. Bluetooth scanning constantly in the background chewed through maybe 15% of my battery in about ninety minutes, which is not nothing when you're already the kind of person who forgets a charger.
The part that actually impressed me is the range problem gets solved by the crowd itself. One phone alone in a room might reach thirty feet. But every phone running the app becomes a relay for every other phone, so a dense crowd (like, say, tens of thousands of people occupying several city blocks) can pass a message a mile or more without a single cell tower involved. That's genuinely clever infrastructure thinking, the kind of thing that only works because of the specific situation it landed in. It's the same idea behind those old mesh networking demos from a few years back, except this time it had an actual population dense and motivated enough to make the network worth anything.
I dont think FireChat is going to replace texting for anybody reading this. The UI is rough, the public channels are basically noise, and unless you're at a huge event or somewhere the network is actively unreliable there's no real reason to use it over iMessage or just, you know, talking. I also cant shake the feeling that "an app for when you dont trust the network" is a weirdly bleak category of software to exist at all, even if I'm glad it does.
Also, unrelated complaint I need to get off my chest while I'm here: I still havent bought a case for my phone because of all the bendgate paranoia last month, and carrying it bare in my back pocket for three weeks straight is exactly as dumb an idea as it sounds. Ordering one tonight. Should've done it in September.
Anyway. Go read about what's actually happening in Hong Kong if you havent — the app is a footnote, the protests are the real story. I just cant help getting distracted by the plumbing.