India just banned bitchat.

India just banned bitchat. That should tell you everything you need to know about how powerful it is.

The app was pulled from both the App Store and Google Play in India after a demand from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Apple’s reason: “it includes content that is illegal in India.”

What content? It’s a local mesh app that hops messages over Bluetooth between nearby phones. There’s no data center full of messages for anyone to rifle through.

The timing says it all. The ban came right after authorities shut off mobile internet for 12 hours during a protest in Delhi. Bitchat was built for exactly that situation. No cell towers, no Wi-Fi, no accounts, no phone numbers, no central server to raid. Just phones talking to each other.

Here’s the thing India’s government doesn’t seem to understand: bitchat is free and open source. They can pressure Apple and Google to stop distributing it. They can’t make the code disappear.

Android users can grab the APK from GitHub and sideload it. The app even has a “Share BitChat” feature that sends itself to another phone over a local hotspot. No internet required. One person with the app can spread it to everyone around them.

We saw what this looks like in practice last year when Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica. Bitchat jumped to the second most downloaded app on the island. When banking and communications went down, people used bitcoin to move money and bitchat to talk to each other.

Download bitchat before you need it. App Store, Google Play, or the APK. You might not use it for a year. But when the towers go down or your government decides you shouldn’t be able to talk to your neighbors, you’ll be glad it’s on your phone.

Get your family on it. Get your neighbors on it. This is a grassroots thing.

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