MeshLive, an open-source Android app, livestreams video phone to phone over Bluetooth with no internet, each phone passing it on about 20 metres

Picture four phones in a field, about 20 metres apart. The first one goes live with its camera. The second watches and passes the stream along, the third does the same, and the fourth is watching video from 60 metres away with no tower, no Wi-Fi and no server anywhere in the chain.

That’s the diagram on the MeshLive repo, and it’s the whole pitch. “Every phone passes it on, so you reach further than Bluetooth alone,” the README says. “No internet, no SIM, no account.”

The repo went up on October 10. Its main contributor on GitHub is Gautam Gupta (@gautamgpt1), in New Delhi, and the app has shipped four betas since, the latest on October 26. The 0.3.0 beta’s files alone were downloaded more than 1,200 times.

Calls are the careful part. A call goes “straight to the other phone, or through phones in between when they are out of range (beta),” and the roadmap lists relayed private calls as “First slice coded, Experimental.” The privacy notes add that relayed calls “work only with verified contacts.” Livestreams are the thing that hops today.

For a 16-day-old repo, the privacy notes run long. Your phone’s broadcast ID is random and “changes every 15 minutes, so a listener cannot follow you.” At each UTC quarter hour, every MeshLive advertisement on the phone stops, “stays silent for a random 1 to 8 seconds and restarts on a new address with a new ID.” A stranger who calls you meets a throwaway identity, and your real one goes out only after you press Accept.

There’s even an option to rename your phone “Phone” in Bluetooth, because older Android versions let any phone that connects read your device name. The docs warn that it renames the phone for your headphones and your car, too, and show your original name so you can put it back.

And then there’s the device results page, where the project grades itself harder than most vendors would. “So far no phone has met all of our checks, so there is no ‘pass’ yet.” Seven phones from Samsung, Xiaomi, ASUS and OPPO, Android 10 through 16, none rated better than partial. Viewers reached through a relay in the October 8 test “played at 0.9 to 7.6 frames per second.”

Most of those partials still carried the picture. In the project’s public benchmark data, “about three in four failed executions (930 of 1,261) delivered media to every phone that was meant to receive it” and then missed a deliberately strict gate, like first picture inside 3 seconds or zero freezes. The README’s own advice: “don’t rely on it where your safety depends on it.” An iPhone version is in progress. Whether the hops hold up at a festival with a few hundred phones in range is the test nobody has run yet.

What MeshLive is really testing is whether a crowd can be the network. Festivals, stadiums, subway platforms and blackouts all have the same shape: hundreds of phones within a few metres of each other and no usable signal. A mesh app gets better with every person who installs it, so every new user near you adds metres to your reach, and its download count and its range end up as one number.

The repo’s “Design B: group calls” sits on the roadmap as “Design only,” and Wi-Fi Direct is “Not started.” Either one would change what a phone-to-phone network can carry. So would the first independent security audit, which the README says hasn’t happened yet.