Talk to the people nearby — no signal required.

Yes. Knit is free and has no ads. It's funded entirely by donations, which is why there's a Ko-fi button on this page. If it's useful to you, chipping in keeps development going.

Yes. Knit uses your phone's Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios to talk directly to nearby devices — no internet connection, no cell service, no server anywhere in the path. The one exception is opt-in: switch on Internet relays and an existing chat can keep flowing when nobody is in radio range. Leave them off and Knit never touches the internet.

Each hop covers the range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, typically tens of metres. But because every phone relays for every other, a message can travel much further than any single device by leap-frogging through the people in between.

Out of the box, no — Knit is built for the people around you, and a message waits in the mesh until a path appears. If you want more, switch on Internet relays in settings. A relay is a small store-and-forward service — run by anyone, including you — that holds sealed copies of an existing conversation so a DM or group keeps flowing when nobody is in radio range. Relays can't read a word: they hold encrypted frames, there are no accounts, and sealed copies expire within 48 hours. What a relay does see is that a conversation is active and the IP addresses connecting to it, so leave relays off if that matters to you. The public Nearby room never uses the internet — it's radio-only by nature.

Your 1:1 and group chats are end-to-end encrypted: the message text, mentions, image attachments and voice notes are sealed so only the people in the conversation can read them, even though each message relays hop-by-hop through other phones. Those chats are also forward-secret. Knit derives fresh keys as a conversation goes back and forth and deletes the spent ones, so mesh traffic somebody captured last month stays shut even if they get at a phone's keys later. You can confirm a contact's identity in person by comparing a safety number or scanning their QR code. The one exception is the public Nearby room, which is open by design. Like talking out loud in a crowd, anyone in range can read it.

Not by picking it up. Knit keeps your conversations in an encrypted database on the device, and its key lives in the phone's hardware keystore and stays out of cloud backups, so copying the files off a locked phone gets you ciphertext. Reading the chats means unlocking the phone with your PIN, pattern or fingerprint and opening Knit, the same as any other messenger. Forward secrecy answers a different worry: somebody who records mesh traffic as it goes past cannot decrypt it later, because the keys that would open it are already deleted.

Yes. The Knit app's full source code is public on GitHub under the GPLv3 licence. Anyone can read exactly how it works: how direct and group chats are encrypted, how moderation runs on your device, and that nothing is quietly tracked or uploaded. And anyone can build it and contribute. You don't have to take our word for it.

Just the nearby-devices permission, so Knit can find the phones around you. Older Android versions may also ask for location, because the system ties Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning to it. But Knit never uses your location for anything else. It works best when allowed to run in the background so it can keep relaying for the people around you.

Knit is live on the Google Play Store and on F-Droid, the app store for free and open-source software. Tap either button on this page to install it. F-Droid builds Knit from the public source, so you can check that what lands on your phone matches the code on GitHub. Either way it's the same free app, and support on Ko-fi is what keeps it growing.

An Android 10 phone or newer. That's it. No Google Play services, no SIM and no account. Knit meshes over both Wi-Fi Aware and Bluetooth LE, so it still works on phones that only have one of the two.