Messaging with no towers, no accounts.
An Android chat app that sends messages phone to phone over Bluetooth. Each phone passes messages along to the next, so a group stays in touch with no signal, no wifi, no accounts and no phone numbers. Our part was making it simple enough that a normal person would actually use it.
assets/screens/ochat-threads.png
The technology was good. The screens were built for programmers.
The original app is very good, but it was made for programmers. Everything scrolled past in one long list, you typed commands to do things, and private chats were hidden away. That is fine for the people who built it. It is a wall for everyone else, and the people who most need this app during a blackout are the everyone else.
So we rebuilt every screen to look like a normal chat app: a list of conversations, a full screen for each chat, and tick marks for delivered and read. The same shapes people already know from WhatsApp.
And we changed nothing beneath it. We changed nothing underneath. The way phones find each other, the way messages are packed and encrypted, all of it is untouched, so our version still talks to the original app on Android and iPhone. Changing that would have made it a different app, not an improvement.
The people who most need a no-network chat app are not the people who enjoy typing commands.
- Full interface rewrite in Jetpack Compose
- A list of chats, and a full screen per chat, instead of one long scroll
- Delivered and read shown as ticks, not as lines of text
- Nothing underneath was changed, so it still talks to the original app on Android and iPhone
From the build, not from a mockup.
These slots take real captures from the APK. Until those land they stay empty, because an invented chat screen would prove nothing.
assets/screens/ochat-threads.png
assets/screens/ochat-thread.png
assets/screens/ochat-mesh.png
We work in the open where we can.
OChat is public, MIT-spirited and yours to fork. Client work is private, but the same standards apply to both.