Bitchat, Dorsey's Bluetooth Mesh App, Hit #1 in France as Officials Pushed Social Media Blocks

Bitchat, a Bluetooth mesh messaging app Jack Dorsey built as a weekend project, climbed to number one in France's App Store Social Networking category this week, according to Gizmodo. The same days brought a near-ten-hour Orange mobile network outage, the October 17 cost-of-living mobilisation that left more than 1,800 people arrested, and two senior French officials publicly arguing for temporary, targeted social media blocks.

Bitchat routes messages phone-to-phone over Bluetooth, so nearby devices relay traffic without internet, accounts, or phone numbers. It uses the Noise Protocol for end-to-end encryption, and an optional Nostr layer can carry messages over longer-range or geo-bounded channels when online. On Android, the app can be installed peer-to-peer without going through the app store. Dorsey announced the project on July 6 of the prior year as a way to learn mesh networking, store-and-forward relays, and encryption, calling it "IRC vibes." It's a personal side project, not a Block product, and Twitter/X has no role in operating it.

The outage did part of the work of explaining the chart. Orange suffered a nearly ten-hour mobile network outage on Wednesday of the same week, cutting voice and data for an extended window. A mesh app that needs no carrier, no SIM, and no tower has obvious appeal when a tower is down, even if most of the surge likely reflects curiosity and protest-related download traffic more than fielded use. Chart rank is not installed base, and the #1 slot is a dated operating measurement of a specific audience, not a count of active French users.

The political context is the other half of the convergence. On October 17, demonstrators took to the streets in a national "Bloquons tout" cost-of-living mobilisation against austerity, taxes, and the cost of living. Violence and looting occurred at the margins, with French press summaries reporting more than 1,800 arrests, according to Gizmodo's coverage of French press reports. The human stakes belong to that protest movement, not to the app that briefly topped a chart in its wake.

Two days later, former Prime Minister and presidential candidate Gabriel Attal told RTL that the government should be able to impose temporary, targeted social media blocks in areas experiencing riots, citing his own 2024 New Caledonia TikTok block as precedent. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the French Senate that social networks are "a real problem" and floated suspending platforms used to coordinate looting. The remarks are now on the public record, in the same week that an offline-capable, peer-to-peer app was being downloaded in unusual numbers in France.

The precedent Attal cited has already been narrowed. France's Conseil d'État, the country's highest administrative court, struck down the 2024 New Caledonia TikTok block as a disproportionate infringement of freedom of expression. Any new French attempt at temporary, targeted blocking will arrive in a legal environment that has already been tightened against it. Officials can still demand the power; the courts have already said what that power looks like when it goes too far.

Open, peer-to-peer infrastructure earns attention the moment a government is openly asking for block authority and a major carrier is offline. Dorsey is one of several builders working on this layer; the contribution is the dated operating measurement and the policy reaction, not a new architecture.

What is next: whether France's regulator or its data-protection authority comments on the surge, whether Attal or Nuñez translates the block demand into legislative text, and whether the Conseil d'État's 2024 New Caledonia ruling shapes that text or is treated as something to override. Chart rank fades. The legal precedent Attal cited has already been narrowed, and any new block demand will now have to clear that test.