Group chat that works when cell service doesn’t.
Encore is a Bluetooth-mesh group chat for concerts and festivals. When 40,000 phones kill the towers, your crowd keeps talking, phone to phone. No servers, no accounts, no internet. Ever.
The problem
At the show, the network is the first thing to die.
Tens of thousands of people, one cell tower. Texts stall, the group chat freezes, and “meet you by the …” never arrives. Encore skips the network entirely. Phones relay messages to each other over Bluetooth, so the more crowded it gets, the better the mesh works.
How it works
From locked phone to live crowd in three taps.
No setup, no signal. Encore is designed to be used one-handed, in the dark, while you're holding a drink.
Open it. Pick a name.
No phone number, no email, no account. Encore hands you a name for the night. Keep it or reroll. Your name is only ever shared over Bluetooth with people right next to you.
Scan the gate QR, or pull it from the crowd.
Scan the organizer's poster to load the event, or grab it from any phone nearby that already has it. A four-emoji fingerprint lets you check it's the real event before you join.
Talk to everyone around you.
Nearby chat, organizer channels, and a private thread for your crew, all over the mesh. Every message shows its honest reach: how many phones actually received it.
Features
Everything a crowd needs. Nothing it doesn't.
Built on the proven bitchat mesh and the Noise protocol, wrapped in a deliberately minimal interface.
True offline mesh
Messages hop phone to phone over Bluetooth LE. No tower, no Wi-Fi, no servers anywhere in the path. The crowd is the network.
Crew threads
Spin up a private group for your people, like “Left Bar Gang,” and invite with a QR or a six-letter code. Members-only, end-to-end encrypted.
Verified announcements
Organizer updates arrive signed with an Ed25519 key. Only the real event can post them, and your phone proves it before showing the OFFICIAL banner.
Honest delivery
No fake checkmarks. “Reached 6 nearby” means six phones actually received the packet. You always know what really got through.
Nothing to leak
No accounts, no profiles, no backend. Messages live in memory and clear themselves. There's no database to breach because there's no database.
Event packs
One signed QR re-skins the whole app to the event: colors, channels, schedule, announcement keys. It feels like the festival shipped its own app.
For organizers
Run a comms channel for your whole crowd. No infrastructure.
Encore gives festivals and venues a verified broadcast line and a branded chat that survives a dead network. Set it up in an afternoon, with nothing to host.
One QR is the whole deployment
Your event pack is a signed, self-contained file holding branding, channels, schedule, and announcement keys. Distribute it as a single QR on a poster, or let it spread phone to phone. No servers to run, nothing to publish to an app store.
Re-skin the app, ship zero assets
Five colors and an emoji monogram retheme every screen to your event. Attendees open Encore and see your show, not a generic chat app.
Broadcast that can't be faked
Mark a channel broadcast and only your key can post to it. Weather holds, set-time changes, lost-and-found: signed, verified, and pinned to the top of every phone in range.
Private because there’s nothing to collect.
Encore has no backend, so there’s no honeypot. You never make an account. Your messages travel directly between phones and clear themselves from memory. Direct messages and crew threads are end-to-end encrypted with the Noise protocol.
servers, accounts, or phone numbers
encrypted DMs and crew threads (Noise XX)
messages never written to disk
Built honest
We tell you what works, and what doesn’t yet.
Encore is early (v0.1) and deliberately honest about it. Both the iOS and Android apps share one byte-identical wire format and run today. Here’s the real state of things.
- iOS and Android talk on the same mesh, byte for byte.
- Organizer announcements are cryptographically verified end to end.
- Crew-thread keys are shared per night, with no member revocation yet.
- Text, emoji, and cards today; richer media is on the roadmap.
Keep the crowd connected.
Encore is open source and in active development. Clone it, run the demo with no hardware, or build an event pack for your next show.