Meshtastic

Meshtastic® is an open-source project that turns inexpensive LoRa radios into a long-range, off-grid messaging network. The radios relay messages among themselves, forming a mesh, so a message can hop across several radios to reach someone out of direct range, with no mobile coverage or internet. The phone is only the interface: this official app pairs it with your own radio, and through that radio with everyone else on the mesh.

You need a radio

The app has nothing useful to do without one. You need a LoRa device running the Meshtastic firmware, which is a separate open-source project. The project’s list of community favourites includes RAK’s starter kit, Seeed’s T1000-E card tracker, Heltec’s T114 and LILYGO’s T-Deck, and it recommends devices with the newer Semtech SX126x or LR11xx radio chips. Don’t power on a radio without its antenna attached: the project warns that this can damage the radio chip.

The phone connects to the radio in one of three ways:

• Bluetooth, the default. The pairing PIN shows on the radio’s screen, or is 123456 on radios without one.
• USB, if your phone supports USB OTG.
• Wi-Fi, for radios built on the ESP32 chip, by IP address or found automatically on the network.

What the app does

From the project’s documentation:

• Messages on channels, which everyone with the channel’s key can read, and direct messages encrypted to the other radio’s public key. A message can be up to 200 bytes. The 2.8.2 release notes highlight swipe to reply, reactions, drafts and pinned conversations.
• A node list and a map of the radios yours has heard, with waypoints, map layers and offline maps.
• Telemetry from radios with sensors: battery, environment, air quality and power.
• Radio settings and firmware updates, over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or USB depending on the radio.
• MQTT, which links the mesh to the internet. The phone can serve as the radio’s internet connection.

Privacy and radio rules

• Every radio comes with a default channel, LongFast, whose key is publicly known, so anyone using the same settings can read it. For private group messages, set up a channel with your own key.
• When you share your position, it goes to every radio on the channel.
• A new radio doesn’t transmit until you choose your region, which keeps it within your country’s radio rules. For Brazil, Meshtastic’s documentation lists the ANZ and BR_902 regions.

This is the F-Droid flavour

Meshtastic comes in two flavours. The google flavour, on Google Play, adds Firebase Crashlytics and Datadog to report crashes and errors, Google Maps, and Google’s push messaging. The fdroid flavour, the one here, has no Google code: its maps are drawn with MapLibre, and a few features that rely on Google’s on-device services, such as message translation, are left out. It also requests access to all files, which only this flavour declares; the project uses it to export route data for the ATAK app.

About this file

• This is the developer’s build of 2.8.2, byte for byte the 64-bit ARM APK on the project’s GitHub release, signed by Kevin Hester of Geeksville Industries and delivered through IzzyOnDroid. IzzyOnDroid rebuilt it from the source code and got the same file. F-Droid’s copy of the app is signed with the same key.
• It is for 64-bit ARM phones only. The project’s GitHub release also has 32-bit ARM and universal APKs.
• It won’t update the Google Play version: the project says Android refuses because the signatures differ, and uninstalling the Play version deletes your message history and settings.
• It is much bigger than version 2.8.1 because 2.8.2 brought the MapLibre map engine to this flavour; its native library accounts for most of the difference.
• The 33.2 MB file runs on Android 8.0 and later and declares 20 permissions. It doesn’t request background location access.

Meshtastic® is a registered trademark of Meshtastic LLC. Meshtastic software components are released under various licenses, see GitHub for details. No warranty is provided - use at your own risk.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017).

Versions currently kept in the IzzyOnDroid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.