Open Source
Hopline
Chat with everyone around you when there's no signal
This comes straight from Hopline’s own GitHub page — it’s free. Need help installing? →
What it looks like
About this app
Hopline is group chat for places with no mobile signal and no WiFi: treks, camps, festivals, fairs, rallies, power cuts.
Phones link to each other directly over Bluetooth and WiFi, and every phone passes messages along for the others. A message can travel down a whole line of hikers or across a packed ground, far beyond the reach of any single phone. No internet, no account, no server, no hotspot to set up.
One person starts a group and gets a 3-word code like "tiger river lamp". Everyone else types the three words or scans the QR. Then it's a familiar chat app: group chat, private chats, photos, files, voice notes and locations. Walk out of range and back, and the chat catches up by itself.
Location, even live. Send where you are - GPS works with no signal and no internet - or a meeting point typed as coordinates or pasted as a Google Maps link. Everyone sees the pin with how far away it is and which way ("1.2 km away, north-east of you"), worked out on their own phone, offline; tapping it opens their maps app. Or share your location live for 15 minutes, an hour or 8 hours: it rides the beacons phones already send each other, so it costs no extra radio traffic, and the People screen shows everyone who is sharing, updating as you both walk. A banner in the chat and the always-on notification mean it is never sharing quietly, one tap stops it, and it stops itself when the time is up.
Voice notes. Tap the mic, talk for up to a minute, send. About 180 KB a minute, carried in pieces like a photo, with a play bar that fills in honestly as those pieces arrive.
Replies, reactions and mentions. Swipe any message to reply - the quote travels with the reply, so it still reads properly on a phone that never received the original, and tapping a quote jumps back to it. Long-press for quick emoji reactions, and tap the pill under a message to see who reacted. Type @ to mention someone; being mentioned always buzzes, even for messages that arrive late as backlog.
Photos and files. Photos are shrunk hard (about 0.3 MB) so they hop in seconds, travel phone to phone in pieces, and are put back together on every phone - even ones that were away when you sent them. Files up to 2 MB.
More than one group. Keep a group for the trek, one for the family, one for the festival crew. Switching is one tap, and each group keeps its own history, unread counts and files.
The ticks never lie: a clock while it waits for a phone in range, one tick when it is on its way, two ticks when phones confirm. A photo's tick only appears when the whole photo is on the other phone. Tap your own message to see exactly who has it, by name.
Built for a few friends or a crowd: in a small group every phone confirms every message; in a gathering of hundreds the phones automatically stop chattering about receipts, slow their "I am here" beacons and switch photos off, so the radios carry your words instead of overhead. A location is only a hundred bytes, so pins keep working even then.
If anyone in the group gets internet, everyone can use a sliver of it: read a web page as plain text, or send an SMS/email home through the friend's phone - the answer hops back to the whole group. Your phone only shares while its "Share my internet" switch is on.
Android 8+ with Google Play services. Each hop is Bluetooth range (about 20-40 m in the open). Android only; no end-to-end encryption, so anyone with the 3-word code is in the group; media kept deliberately small. Install it on every phone before you need it.
From the app’s home page
- See the codeHow it’s made — every line is public
- Questions & commentsTalk with the people who make it
- Report a problemTell the makers something is broken
- All versionsOlder downloads and what changed
- LicenseThe rules for using and sharing it
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