FireChat

» see opengarden.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

firechat was an open garden product that did something genuinely strange for 2014: it let phones talk to each other without a tower. apple's multipeer connectivity on iOS and bluetooth-plus-wifi mesh on android were stitched into a routing layer so a message could hop from your phone to the phone of a stranger 30 meters away to the phone of someone three blocks past that. the network grew with density.

this is the kind of thing engineers love and end-users mostly forget exists. firechat would have stayed a clever demo app forever if it were not for one specific weekend in september 2014, when hong kong students filling the streets for the umbrella movement realized their phones might be more compromised than they were comfortable with. firechat downloads went from a trickle to several hundred thousand in 24 hours.

i watched all of this from turkey, far outside the protest. the gezi park summer of 2013 had already happened the year before, and during that period people i knew were passing around zello and offline maps and vpns. firechat was on the same shelf of tools that get a brief, emergency-driven moment of relevance and then sit quiet again. i installed it once out of curiosity. there was nobody nearby running it, which is what most people who downloaded it discovered too.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

after hong kong, firechat showed up wherever the underlying conditions repeated. iraq used it during a 2014 government internet block. ecuador used it during 2015 demonstrations. catalan independence supporters generated 131,000 firechat sessions on september 11 2015. india's university of hyderabad used it during january 2016 student protests. each time the pattern was the same: cell network compromised or jammed, app gets pushed in group chats, downloads spike for a week, then silence.

~ the funny part ~

firechat was always honest about what it was not. the developers said publicly in 2014 that this was not a secure communications tool. messages were not end-to-end encrypted at launch. that came in july 2015 with a private messaging mode, but by then the protest reputation was set, and people kept using it for things it was not designed to do safely. the open garden team kept asking journalists to please stop calling it a privacy app.

~ what got buried with it ~

firechat's actual research contribution was the mesh stack underneath, not the chat ui. open garden tried to license that to telecoms and IoT companies for years, and the consumer app got less attention because of it. by the time the last update shipped in 2018 it had been a side project for the company's real business for a while. there are no screenshots of the death notice because there was no death notice. the apps just stopped working when the cloud bits behind them got turned off in early 2020. the idea of phones routing around the network when the network is hostile did not die with firechat, but no successor with the same brand recognition has shown up to replace it.

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