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Knit vs Bridgefy

Two Bluetooth mesh messengers with very different ideas about what you should have to hand over before the first message.

Last reviewed: August 2026

Bridgefy is the best-known phone mesh messenger going. It runs on iPhone and Android, it has been through protests in Hong Kong, Nigeria, Belarus and India, and it licenses the same mesh technology to other developers as an SDK.

It also asks you to sign in with a Google or Apple account, over the internet, before it will carry a message — and signs you out again if you leave it alone for long enough. For an app whose whole pitch is the moment the internet is gone, that is a strange first step, and it is the clearest difference between the two.

Knit has no accounts at all. Nothing to sign into, nothing to sign out of, no internet needed at any point in the mesh. It is also GPLv3, so the claims on this page are ones you can go and check.

Knit compared with Bridgefy across the features people ask about most.
Feature	Knit	Bridgefy
Works with no internet¹	Yes	Yes, after you sign in once
No account, no password	Yes	No, Google or Apple sign-in
Multi-hop mesh — messages relay beyond your own radio	Yes	Yes
Meshes over Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth²	Yes	No
Open room with everyone nearby³	Yes	Yes
End-to-end encrypted direct & group chats	Yes	DMs only; public chat is open
Named group chats	Yes	No, public chat and 1:1
Forward secrecy⁴	Yes	Via the Signal protocol
Photos, GIFs & voice notes	Yes	Yes
Source code you can read	Yes, GPLv3	No, closed source
On-device AI moderation	Yes	No
Works over the internet⁵	Yes, via optional relays	Only to sign in
iPhone app	No	Yes
Free, no ads, open source	Yes, GPLv3	Free app; closed source

¹Bridgefy's own App Store listing describes signing in with a Google or Apple account on first launch, over the internet, after which offline messaging works. Users report being signed out again after a period of inactivity, which means re-authenticating — online — before it will work again.
²Wi-Fi Aware gives Knit's mesh the bandwidth for photos and GIFs, fetched on demand so large files never flood it. Bridgefy meshes over Bluetooth alone and quotes a range of about 100 metres per hop.
³Both open rooms are plaintext by design — an open broadcast, like talking out loud in a crowd. In Knit, the sealed part is direct and group chats.
⁴Knit rotates keys per block of messages, not per message, and a chat with someone on an older Knit build falls back to the previous static-key scheme, which has none. Spent keys are deleted, so mesh traffic recorded today can't be decrypted later. Bridgefy adopted the Signal protocol in October 2020; a 2022 paper found its use of that protocol was incorrectly implemented — see below.
⁵Knit's Internet relays are opt-in and off until you add one, and they carry only conversations you already started nearby, as sealed frames the relay can't read — no accounts, no discovery, and you can run your own. The Nearby room stays radio-only.

The sign-in, and why it matters here

Every messenger has to decide what it needs from you before it works. Bridgefy asks for a Google or Apple account and an internet connection, once, on first launch. After that the mesh runs offline as advertised.

The trouble is when "once" lands. Install it during a blackout and there is no internet to authenticate against. Come back to it after a few quiet months, at the moment you actually need it, and you may find yourself signed out and unable to sign back in. The failure mode is precise: the app stops working exactly when the conditions it was built for arrive.

Knit asks for nothing. There is no account, no password, no e-mail, no phone number and no sign-in step, so there is no state where it works for other people but not for you. Install it whenever, including from a phone that has never had a SIM in it.

Encryption, and the two times it was broken

Bridgefy's encryption has been publicly broken twice, and the dates matter. In August 2020, researchers at Royal Holloway published an analysis of Bridgefy and reported attacks that allowed de-anonymising users, building social graphs, reading direct messages, impersonating users and running man-in-the-middle attacks. Bridgefy's developers acknowledged at the time that no part of the app was encrypted, and adopted the Signal protocol by late October 2020.

In 2022, a second paper — "Breaking Bridgefy, again: Adopting libsignal is not enough", by Martin Albrecht, Raphael Eikenberg and Kenneth Paterson, presented at USENIX Security — found that adoption was incorrectly implemented, and reported further practically exploitable vulnerabilities in the messenger and the SDK. The researchers noted the state of remediation was still unclear when they asked in early 2022.

Both papers are years old, the app has been through many releases since, and we are not claiming they describe the app you would install today. We are saying we cannot tell you whether they do, and neither can you, because Bridgefy is closed source. Knit is GPLv3: anybody can read how the encryption works and say so publicly. That is auditability, which is not the same as an audit — Knit has not had a third-party security review either, and we are not going to imply otherwise.

Where Bridgefy is ahead

It runs on iPhone. Knit does not, and for a lot of groups that decides it on its own — a mesh only helps if the people around you can join it.

It has the numbers. Bridgefy has been downloaded by millions and has years of protest and disaster use behind it, which means the people near you are more likely to already have it.

It shares precise locations, which Knit does not do at all. If knowing where somebody is matters more to you than the account question, that is a real reason to pick it.

The browser demo shows the hop-by-hop idea without installing anything: knock out a cell tower, then walk a message across a crowd.

Choose Bridgefy if…

Anyone you need to reach is on an iPhone.
You want the largest existing user base, so there are more phones nearby already running it.
You want to share precise locations as well as messages.
You are happy to sign in with a Google or Apple account, and to keep that sign-in fresh.

Choose Knit if…

You want no account and no sign-in, so it works on a phone with no SIM and no history.
You want it to keep working after months untouched, with no re-authentication in the way.
You want named group chats, end-to-end encrypted, not just a public room and 1:1.
You want the mesh to use Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth, which is what makes photos and voice notes practical.
You would rather read the source than take a security claim on trust.

Common questions

Does Bridgefy need an account?

Yes. Its own App Store listing describes signing in with a Google or Apple account on first launch, which needs an internet connection. Offline messaging works after that, though users report being signed out again after a stretch of inactivity.

Is Bridgefy end-to-end encrypted?

Bridgefy uses the Signal protocol for direct messages, and has done since October 2020. Its public chat is open, like any broadcast room. Whether the implementation holds up is a separate question — a 2022 USENIX paper found it did not at the time, and the app is closed source, so nobody outside the company can check the current build.

Is Bridgefy safe to use at a protest?

That is a decision to make with better information than a marketing page from a competitor. What we can tell you is the record: two published academic analyses, in 2020 and 2022, each found serious exploitable problems, and the code is closed, so the current state cannot be verified independently. If your threat model includes a determined adversary, weigh that carefully — and note that Knit's own Nearby room is plaintext by design, and Knit has had no third-party audit either.

Is Bridgefy open source?

No. The app and the SDK are proprietary, and the SDK is licensed commercially to other developers. Knit's app is GPLv3 with its source on GitHub.

Bridgefy facts here were checked in August 2026 against Bridgefy's own App Store listing and developer documentation, and the security history against the two published papers cited above. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Tell us and we’ll fix it.

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