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Knit vs FireChat
FireChat proved a phone mesh could matter. It stopped being updated in 2018 — here is what it did, and where that leaves you.
Last reviewed: August 2026
FireChat is why a lot of people know a phone mesh is possible at all. Open Garden shipped it for iPhone in March 2014 and for Android that April, and within months it was carrying traffic through the Hong Kong umbrella protests, an internet shutdown in Iraq and blocks in Iran. For a few years it was the answer to "how do I message people with no signal".
FireChat stopped receiving updates in 2018. If you remember its phone-to-phone conversations, Knit offers a way to explore that idea today on Android, with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi carrying messages through nearby phones.
Knit combines an open public room with end-to-end encrypted direct and group chats. The Nearby room is an open broadcast, plaintext by design, while direct and group conversations are for their participants.
| Feature | Knit | FireChat |
|---|---|---|
| Works with no internet | Yes | Yes |
| Still being developed1 | Yes | No, last updated 2018 |
| Multi-hop mesh — messages relay beyond your own radio | Yes | Yes |
| Store & forward for offline peers | Yes | Yes |
| Open room with everyone nearby2 | Yes | Yes |
| End-to-end encrypted direct & group chats3 | Yes | 1:1 only, from 2015 |
| Forward secrecy4 | Yes | Not documented |
| Photos, GIFs & voice notes | Yes | Images only |
| On-device AI moderation | Yes | No |
| Works over the internet5 | Yes, via optional relays | Yes |
| Free, no ads, open source | Yes, GPLv3 | Was free; closed source |
- 1FireChat's apps stopped receiving updates in 2018 and its official site now returns a 404. Nothing was ever announced.
- 2Both open rooms are plaintext by design — an open broadcast, like talking out loud in a crowd. FireChat's public chatrooms were the same, which mattered because a lot of people used them during protests as though they were not.
- 3Open Garden said it had added end-to-end encryption to one-to-one private messages in July 2015. Its public chatrooms were never encrypted, and we know of no independent review of either claim.
- 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. FireChat never published a description of its key handling.
- 5Knit's Internet relays are opt-in and off until you add one, and they carry only existing direct and group conversations, as sealed frames the relay can't read. No accounts, no discovery, and you can run your own. The Nearby room stays radio-only.
How FireChat connected people
It meshed over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Apple's Multipeer, so iPhones and Android phones could pass messages to each other with no tower involved. Nodes had to be within roughly 60 metres of each other, and messages travelled further by hopping through the people in between.
It used store and forward, so a phone held what it could not yet deliver and passed it on when it next met another device. That is the part that made it work in a moving crowd rather than only in a static one.
On top of that sat public chatrooms, private one-to-one messages, private groups of up to 50 people, and image sharing. The public rooms were the headline feature and the reason it spread.
Why it mattered, and why that was complicated
The protest story is real: when a network is blocked or saturated, a mesh of the phones already present is genuinely the thing that still works, and FireChat demonstrated that at a scale nobody had before.
The complication was that its public chatrooms were open by design, and a great many people used them during protests as though they were confidential. Researchers and press pointed this out at the time. Open Garden added encrypted private messages in July 2015, but the room everybody was actually using stayed open.
That history makes clear labelling important. Knit's Nearby room is plaintext by design, an open broadcast for everyone in range. Direct and group conversations have their own end-to-end encryption.
Bring phone-to-phone chat to your group
For a new group, start with an app that is still maintained and available through its official distribution channels. Knit is available for Android through Google Play and F-Droid.
If you are on Android and you want the thing FireChat was loved for, Knit does it: messages hop phone to phone over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi with no internet or cell service required, no account, and source you can read. It keeps every direct and group message and can find any of them by what it said, and a file too big to attach goes to a nearby contact straight over Wi-Fi. On iPhone, Knit is still in development; until it ships, the comparisons with Bitchat and Bridgefy are the ones to read.
The browser demo shows the hop-by-hop idea without installing anything: knock out a cell tower, then walk a message across a crowd.
If you came here for FireChat
- There is no version to install. The apps stopped being updated in 2018 and the site is gone.
- Choose an actively maintained app from its official distribution channels.
- On iPhone today, look at Bitchat or Bridgefy — Knit for iPhone is still in development.
Choose Knit if…
- You are on Android and you want what FireChat did, from something still being worked on.
- You want end-to-end encrypted direct and group chats alongside a clearly labelled public room.
- You would rather read the source than take a claim on trust.
- You want it to work with no account and no sign-in of any kind.
Common questions
Is FireChat still available?
No. The apps have not been updated since 2018 and the official site returns a 404. Copies of the last build exist on mirror sites, but installing an abandoned messaging app from an unofficial source is not a good trade.
What happened to FireChat?
Open Garden stopped updating it after 2018 and took the site down without any announcement that we can find. There was no shutdown notice and no migration path — it simply stopped.
Was FireChat encrypted?
Partly, and late. Its public chatrooms were open by design and never encrypted. Open Garden said it added end-to-end encryption for one-to-one private messages in July 2015, and we know of no independent review of that claim.
What is the closest thing to FireChat now?
On Android, Knit covers the same ground: an open room for everyone nearby, plus sealed direct and group chats, hopping phone to phone with no internet or cell service required. On iPhone, Bitchat and Bridgefy are the live options until Knit for iPhone ships.
FireChat facts here come from Open Garden's own announcements at the time and from contemporary reporting, checked against the encyclopaedia record in August 2026; the app itself can no longer be checked directly, because it is gone. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Tell us and we’ll fix it.
Product names on these pages are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to identify the apps being compared. None of those projects is affiliated with, or has endorsed, Knit.
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