When I launched FireChat back in March 2014, the app quickly reached its first million installations ten days after its launch. The FireChat app was leveraging several wireless technologies, including Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi Direct, and Apple’s MultiPeer Connectivity Framework.

Back then, I remember playing with Wi-Fi Aware on prototype smartphones from the team that participated in the creation of this new wireless standard. We had to wait “only” 10 years to see it come to iOS and to finally fulfill the promises of interoperability between Android and iOS for building longer-range, high-bandwidth, and more stable mesh networks on mobile.

It is exciting to see the recent progress of bitchat from Jack Dorsey and that mobile mesh still has an appeal as a technology for local chat and very likely multiple other applications. 

Contrary to BLE, Wi-Fi Aware was purposefully built for building mesh networks on smartphones. Here is a quick overview of the benefits of Wi-Fi Aware in this Comparative Analysis of Wi-Fi Aware and BLE Mesh for Smartphone-Exclusive Mesh Networks.

The Nodle team made a first implementation of Bitchat using Wi-Fi Aware instead of BLE so the difference in stability and performance can be appreciated. An Android version of the SDK is available here for tests: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CutOJtS6eivGCLAGykwsR7cQtSAjt_A1/view and the code can be accessed on GitHub.

We were able to get up to five devices with Wi-Fi Aware support connecting simultaneously, and it worked great. The mesh is quite stable — much more than the BLE one.

We started to test interoperability between iOS and Android with a version for iPhones, but the Wi-Fi Aware version that has been recently shipped with Apple’s new iOS doesn’t yet match the standard specifications. Therefore, it will require a bit of time and work on Apple’s side so it can work as well as on Android and enable interoperability as it claims.

You can bump our ticket on the Apple Developer forum to accelerate the delivery of a fix by Apple engineers to enable seamless interoperability here: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/800453

If you want to contribute and improve the current Android implementation, you can participate on GitHub here: https://github.com/NodleCode/wifi-aware/tree/main/bitchat-version-on-android-using-Wi-Fi-Aware