The creator of a popular free smartphone messaging app, which doesn't need a network signal and can't be blocked by governments, says he plans to turn it into a full mobile carrier that will never charge for calls or messages.
Micha Benoliel, the entrepreneur behind FireChat-- downloaded six million times since it launched last year for iOS and Android devices -- has told WIRED he plans to turn his peer-to-peer messaging app into a "big telco that's free and is going to remain free".
FireChat, released by Benoliel's San Francisco startup Open Garden, uses peer-to-peer mesh networking to let smartphones connect to each other to exchange messages and photos when offline. You don't need a phone signal or internet connection to send or download messages -- instead, it connects phones using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radio signals as long as they are no more than 200 feet apart. If just five per cent of phones in a city use the app, the company says, then messages can travel through the mesh of off-the-grid phones to cross the entire city within a few minutes.
Last week FireChat launched a way to send encrypted private messages through the network. It also lets users create live chatrooms which tens of thousands of people can access simultaneously to share real-time news -- one reason the app has been popular among activists in Hong Kong, Iraq and Russia to stay in touch even when governments were blocking phone signals. "Telcos have already had their business taken by WhatsApp, WeChat and Line," Benoliel told WIRED at the Rise conference in Hong Kong. "There's a huge opportunity -- in three or four years, you'll have four to five billion smartphones on the market, 80 per cent of them in emerging markets, 80 per cent of those in big cities where people don't necessarily pay for data. We want to go after that market. We believe we can take a big share of it."
The company plans to add audio capability to allow voice calls to be carried across its network -- but without the cost of building a physical infrastructure, unlike the telcos. "It's going to remain free," Benoliel said. "Our vision has always been to create a network out of smartphones. Once you have a network with no capital expenditure, you have great value -- we become a carrier, a mobile operator but with no infrastructure. You can offer wholesale access to that network at very low cost to businesses. You can sell it to internet-of-things manufacturers. You can sell access to other app developers who want additional connectivity. We become a big telco, a full mobile operator, but 100 per cent built on software."
FireChat gained publicity ten days after its launch last year when students in Taiwan downloaded it at scale because they feared that the government would shut down the internet during protests. In ten days, according to the company, it had a million installs. "It gets used anywhere now when governments threaten to shut down social networks -- we see a spike of installs. During the Hong Kong [pro-democracy] demonstrations, half a million people installed the app in a week -- in what was probably the fastest adoption of an app in such a short period of time, in a small geography. It was surreal. We started to verify accounts for reporters, for opinion leaders. It was amazing."
But use cases extend far beyond protests, Benoliel, 43, said. "You can message with your family when on vacation without using the internet; you can use it at a concert to find your friends; DJs at music festivals use it to chat with the crowd. Chat topics in the app range from dating to politics to gigs and video games. It's so reliable, why would you keep using WhatsApp or other messaging apps where you might not have signal?"
The service works by creating a "daisy chain of smartphones" -- using Airdrop, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy on an iPhone, and Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy on Android. When phones are in proximity they detect each other and establish a link -- "the user doesn't have to do anything, everything happens in the background," says the CEO. With offline private messaging, messages are forwarded through the peer-to-peer network until the first person in the group connects to the internet to forward them to non-proximate recipients. The company says that, at five percent urban penetration, it can guarantee message delivery to anyone on the network within 20 minutes, even with no signal.
For the first year, the company gained around six million installs around group messaging. "But private messaging is what people wanted, and we just shipped that. You had SMS almost replaced by IM; now you have what we call OM -- off-the-grid messaging. Your message can go phone to phone. Everyone becomes like a postman. We see the really big opportunity in all the emerging markets where people are buying smartphones but not necessarily paying for mobile data, or the mobile networks are not there yet. We see FireChat as a way to give them their first connectivity experience."
Still, Benoliel accepts that his company -- which has raised around $13m in seed and Series A investments -- faces "many challenges" in its mission. "It's hard to scale the engineering team; we need fast adoption of the app; we need a local presence in emerging markets to make a difference."
And, presumably, governments can't be big fans of FireChat? "Actually, they know we do a lot of good. If you have an earthquake, how do you facilitate communications? FireChat can be that app. This week people in the Philippines were encouraged to install FireChat as part of an earthquake awareness campaign. It's a great solution for disaster recovery -- it gives you a minimal form of communication."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
