Knit — Offline Mesh Messenger

Knit is a messenger that works with no internet, no cell service, no accounts, and no servers. It connects directly to the phones around you over Wi-Fi Aware and Bluetooth to pass messages device to device. When you send a message, nearby phones receive it and relay it onward to the phones around them — so your words can hop across a crowd, a building, or a campsite, reaching people far past your own signal range. The more people using Knit nearby, the further messages travel. WHY KNIT • No internet or mobile data required • No account, phone number, or email to sign up • No central server — nothing to shut down, monitor, or leak • No ads and no tracking, ever • Open source — anyone can read exactly what the app does PERFECT FOR • Festivals, concerts, and crowded venues where signal dies • Travel, flights, ships, and remote areas off the grid • Camping, hiking, and the backcountry • Power outages and emergencies when networks go down • Anywhere you just want to reach the people right around you PRIVATE BY DESIGN Direct and group chats are end-to-end encrypted. Each message is sealed so only the people in the conversation can read it — even as it travels hop by hop through other phones, those relays only ever carry scrambled ciphertext. Your keys are generated on your device and protected by hardware-backed Android security. Confirm you're talking to the right person by comparing a safety number or scanning a QR code in person. OPEN SOURCE Knit is free software under the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), and the full source code is public at github.com/getknit/knit. You don't have to take our word for how any of it works — you can read the code that runs on your phone, or build the whole app yourself. FEATURES • Public "Nearby" room to broadcast to everyone in range • Private 1:1 direct messages (end-to-end encrypted) • Multi-member group chats (end-to-end encrypted) • Quoted replies, emoji reactions, and @-mentions • Profiles with a display name, status, and avatar • Image sharing, including GIFs • Typing indicators and delivery indicators, and unread badges • Store-and-forward — messages wait and deliver when a recipient returns to range • Share the Knit app itself to a nearby phone, offline, with no app store needed SAFER SPACES On-device content filtering screens out abusive text and explicit images, running entirely offline with nothing sent to any server. Sensitive content you receive is blurred behind a tap to reveal, and any sender is one tap away from being blocked. BEAUTIFUL & MODERN A clean, modern messaging interface built with Material 3, including full dark mode. Knit is free, open source, and funded entirely by tips — no ads, no servers, no tracking. If it's useful to you, you can leave a tip at ko-fi.com/zaventh. HOW IT WORKS Knit runs two radios at once — Wi-Fi Aware and Bluetooth Low Energy — to form an ad-hoc mesh network directly with other Knit users near you, so it keeps working even on phones that only support one of the two. It needs the nearby-devices permission to find peers, and works best when allowed to run in the background so the mesh stays connected. Requires Android 10 or newer with Wi-Fi Aware and/or Bluetooth LE support. Note: Knit reaches people who are physically nearby, or within relay range of the crowd between you — it is not a replacement for internet messaging across cities. The public Nearby room is unencrypted by design, since it has no fixed set of recipients.