Knit — Offline Mesh Messenger

Jeff Mixon

About this app

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

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.

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 and funded entirely by tips — no ads, no servers, no tracking.

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.

What’s new

Complete re-write from scratch.