Jack Dorsey launches a WhatsApp messaging rival built on Bluetooth
The Twitter co-founder announced Sunday that the beta version is live on TestFlight, with a full white paper available on GitHub.
In a post on X Sunday Dorsey called it a personal experiment in "bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things."
Bitchat enables ephemeral, encrypted communication between nearby devices. As users move through physical space, their phones form local Bluetooth clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range — even without WiFi or cell service.
Certain "bridge" devices connect overlapping clusters, expanding the mesh across greater distances. Messages are stored only on-device, disappear by default, and never touch centralized infrastructure — echoing Dorsey's long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication.
The launch builds on his support of Damus and Bluesky and reflects a broader push to decentralize everything from social media to payments.
Like the Bluetooth-based apps used during Hong Kong's 2019 protests, Bitchat is designed to keep working even when the internet is blocked, offering a censorship-resistant way to stay connected during outages, shutdowns, or surveillance.
The app also supports optional group chats, or "rooms," which can be named with hashtags and protected by passwords. It includes store-and-forward functionality to deliver messages to users who are temporarily offline.
A future update will add WiFi Direct to increase speed and range, pushing Dorsey's vision for off-grid, user-owned communication even further.
Unlike mainstream messaging platforms like Meta's WhatsApp and Messenger, which are owned and built by big tech companies and rely on personal data, Bitchat operates entirely peer-to-peer with no accounts, no identifiers, and no data collection.
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