Offline guide

Staying in touch when the power is out

A charged phone can help keep your street connected. Set up a local group and share updates while the power is out.

When home internet is unavailable, nearby phones can still connect over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Knit uses those links to carry messages between neighbours.

Mobile coverage during an outage depends on local backup power and network demand. Preparing a local chat in advance gives your neighbours another way to share updates.

What fails, and roughly when

Home broadband and Wi-Fi go immediately. Anything in the house that depends on them — smart speakers, video doorbells, VoIP handsets — goes with them.

Mobile data usually degrades before it disappears. Sites that are still up get busy as everyone in the area falls back to them, so calls fail before texts do and data crawls before it stops.

Your own phone becomes the constraint eventually. A phone hunting for a signal it can't find burns battery fast, which is why switching off the cellular radio during a long outage buys you real hours.

Keep your neighbours connected

A street where neighbours have Knit can keep a local group chat going over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. No internet or cell service is required: charged phones provide the connections.

Messages that can't be delivered right now wait instead of failing. If a neighbour's phone is off or out of range, what you sent moves when a path appears rather than vanishing.

Group chats are end-to-end encrypted, so you can coordinate with neighbours in a members-only thread. To ask everyone nearby about supplies or a meeting point, use the public Nearby room. It is an open broadcast, plaintext by design, and anyone in range can read it.

Get your street ready together

Install it while you still have a connection. An app store you can't reach is no use to you during the outage.
Get one or two neighbours on it. One neighbour gives you someone to talk to; several give everyone else a route.
Allow it to run in the background, so your phone keeps relaying for people even while you're not looking at it.
Keep a power bank charged. Every phone that stays alive is another hop for everyone else.
Agree on a group chat name in advance, so nobody is trying to organise one at 2am in the dark.

What it is not

It is not a way to call for help. Emergency calls go through on any network, from any phone, even with no SIM and no account — that is always the first thing to try.
It only reaches as far as the people running it. On a street where nobody else has installed it, there is no mesh to join.
It doesn't restore anything. Your home internet is still down; this is a way to talk to the people around you, not to get back online.
It runs on battery like everything else. In a multi-day outage, power is the real constraint, not the app.

Common questions

Will my phone still work in a blackout?

The phone itself is fine until the battery runs out. What degrades is the network around it: home broadband goes immediately, and mobile coverage thins as cell sites work through their backup power and the remaining ones get congested.

How long do cell towers keep working without power?

It varies a lot by site and country. Backup is generally measured in hours, with larger sites carrying generators that run much longer if they can be refuelled. The practical version is that coverage in a given area gets worse the longer an outage lasts, rather than switching off all at once.

Can I use this to call the emergency services?

Use Knit to coordinate with nearby people. It does not contact emergency services; use an emergency calling option available on your phone or a separate emergency communication device.

Does it work if the mobile network is up but overloaded?

Yes, and that's a common case. Congestion is what usually stops messages during a big event, and the mesh doesn't touch the congested network at all, so it isn't affected by how many other people are trying to use it.