Daybreak - Bitchat is gone. But the tech race to keep up with protesters isn't

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

On October 3, Jack Dorsey's Bitchat disappeared from Apple's App Store in India after the IT ministry demanded its removal. It vanished from Google Play too. Bitchat lets phones pass messages over Bluetooth, with no internet needed. That made it a lifeline in July, when the government switched off mobile internet around Delhi's Jantar Mantar during student protests. In one week, India accounted for 85% of the app's global downloads. Even an order to pull its code off GitHub didn't stop it spreading. So the government went after the app stores. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at the technology protesters reach for when the internet goes dark, and how governments are learning to keep up.Tune in.Also listen to: Delhi built a ‘safe’ surveillance city. It can now locate anyone in secondsThis episode was edited by Arnav PrakashDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In the last couple of months, every time protesters gather at Delhi's Jantar Mantr, the mobile internet around them goes dark. It happened again last Friday for 12 hours. But here's the thing about internet shutdowns. Lately, governments across the world are realizing that internet shutdowns have a problem. They can cut people off from the internet without necessarily cutting them off from each other. In July, when students protesting at Jandar Mantar found themselves without internet, they turned to BitChat.

BitChat is a messaging app backed by Jack Dorsey. It doesn't need mobile data or Wi-Fi, and it doesn't even need a central server. Instead, it uses Bluetooth to let phones talk directly to nearby phones and pass messages along from one device to another. And India quickly became its biggest market. Between the 17th and 23rd of July, India accounted for 85% of BitChats' global downloads,

which was up from 1% in the previous 30%. days. This is according to Sensor Tower data. More than 91,000 people downloaded it in India in just the span of those five days. In fact, on one of those days, more than 3,30,000 people were using it. The government's first response was to go after the code. On the 23rd of July, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, or I-4C, under the Home Ministry, ordered GitHub to remove three BitChat repositories within three hours. The notice did not point to a particular message or a piece of content. Instead, it objected to the way that BitChat was built. It said that the architecture could allow people to communicate during internet shutdowns and make lawful interception,

attribution and traceability harder. That order did not make BitChad disappear though, because open source code can be copied, forked and shared elsewhere. So now, the fight has moved up another level. Last Saturday, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a demand to Apple under Section 69A to remove BitChat from the Indian App Store. The notice issued by Apple said that the app, and I'm quoting, includes content that is illegal in India. But it did not specify what that content was.

and the underlying blocking order has not been made public. BitChat was also no longer available on Google Play in India after this, although it was not clear whether Google had received the same government order. All of this tells us something interesting about internet shutdowns. The more protesters learn to root around an internet shutdown, the more the fight moves up the technology stack, from the cell tower to the app, to the app store, and perhaps soon to the phone itself.

So in today's episode, we look at the technology that protesters have turned to when the internet goes dark and how governments are learning to follow them. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nicka Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargheese and I will bring you one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 8th of October. So let's start with the technology itself. BitChat is essentially a mesh network built out of people's phones.

Your phone looks for a nearby BitChat user over Bluetooth. If it finds one, the two phones can communicate directly. And messages don't necessarily have to travel straight from you to the person that you're trying to reach. They can hop from one phone to another. So if A can reach B and B can reach C, your message can travel from A to C through B. That means that the network behaves in almost the opposite way to a conventional mobile network. In a conventional mobile network, the phone connects to a tower, the tower connects to a wider network, and if the government switches off that connection, you are offline.

In a mesh network, every phone is potentially a part of the network. The more people there are around you using it, the more possible parts that the message has. But there is an important catch. You need to have the app before you enter the dark zone or you need someone around you who already has it. Now, hold on to that because this basic idea, finding a way for phones to communicate without relying on the internet, is not new. When Egypt's government shut down almost the country's entire internet during the 2011 uprising, Google, Twitter and Say Now built a service called Speak to Tweet over a weekend. You could call a phone number, leave a voicemail and have that message posted to Twitter.

It worked without the internet, but only if your phone line still worked. And it worked because three companies had built a bridge between the telephone network and Twitter. A few years later, protesters in Hong Kong turned to another kind of workaround. In 2014, hundreds of thousands of people downloaded FireChat, a messaging app that could communicate over nearby devices. The important thing is that Hong Kong's government had not actually shut down the internet. But people downloaded the app anyway because they were preparing for the possibility that it might. Then, during the 2019 protests, Hong Kong protesters used another mesh messaging app called BridgeFi.

But that story also came with a warning. Researchers at Royal Holloway found serious vulnerabilities in BridgeFi that could expose users and compromise the security of messages. So, these technologies have always involved a trade-off. The less you rely on the conventional network, the less control the network operator has over your communication. But that does not automatically make the communication safe. And the technology keeps evolving. In September 2025, when Nepal banned 26 social media platforms amid mass protests, BitChat downloads searched from about 3,300 to more than 48,000 in a single day. then came Delhi. India gave this technology one of its biggest real world tests yet. And there is a reason

that this is particularly relevant here. Our country has accounted for more recorded internet shutdowns since 2016 than any other democracy in the world. Nearly half of the 2,100 recorded shutdowns globally in this period from 2016 have been in India. So Indians have had more practice live in through shutdowns than almost anyone else. And you can see the technology evolving with that experience. The first workaround depended on a company building a bridge for you. Then came the apps that could create their own local networks. And now you have an open source software that does not necessarily need a central server

or a company-owned network to keep functioning. But a little less is not zero. There is still a dependency somewhere. And governments know where those. dependencies are. Look at what happened in China. In October 2022, protesters used airdrop to send anti-government posters to strangers in the subway. A few weeks later, Apple changed airdrop settings on iPhones sold in China so that the everyone's setting would only work for 10 minutes at a time. Apple said that the change was intended to reduce unwanted

file sharing and it did not say that the protest use of airdrop was the reason for the change. But the timing drew attention because protesters had used the feature to distribute material without relying on the internet. So, the workaround was built into the phone itself, which brings us back to India and how governments are learning to follow the technology. Stay tuned. The first lesson is to follow the geography. Last Friday's order for Jantar Mantr directed telecom companies to suspend mobile internet services at the protest site and within a, 1.5 kilometer radius from 9am to 9 p.m. It is a much smaller intervention than shutting down connectivity across an entire city. But a smaller shutdown also creates a very obvious boundary.

Walk outside the radius and the internet comes back. And if the communication tool that you're using does not need the internet in the first place, that shutdown is not enough. So the next question becomes, what do you do when you can't see the communication? You watch. You watch. the people. Delhi police, for instance, have said that their facial recognition system can be used to identify people who match their database of known criminals. In fact, this even came up after the first phase of the CGB protests. Now, if some of this is sounding familiar, it's because you heard about it just earlier this week. My colleague Pritap Vikram Singh spent a month investigating Delhi's 857 crore-rupy safe city project.

It was conceived in the name of women's safety, but its mandate has since grown to cover public order surveillance, including political and religious rallies. What Pratab found was a system that the police can use to link a face caught on a camera to records like voter ID and driving license. All of it within seconds. His report headline says it all. Track 50 million faces, identify them in 5.7.

If you miss this episode, it is worth going back to especially now. So, there are two very different kinds of visibility here. The phone can disappear from the network while the phone remains visible on the street. And that changes the problem. The next lesson is to change the question from what protesters are saying to what the technology allows them to do. Look again at the government's July order against pitchat. It did not identify a particular message, post or piece of unlawful content.

Instead, the I-4C focused on the architecture of the app. The concern was that the app could continue to work during an internet shutdown and make lawful interception, attribution, and traceability harder. And that distinction matters. Because some legal experts question whether Section 793B itself gave the government the power to block an entire software project based on the way that it functions. And then, about 10 weeks later, the government used a different legal route.

Haiti invoked Section 69A to get BitChat removed from Apple's Indian App Store. This time, Apple's notice said that the app and I'm quoting includes content that is illegal in India. But again, the underlying order was not public and the notice did not explain what the illegal content was. So, there are two ways of approaching the same technology. You can challenge its functionality. or you can challenge its availability. And the second route brings us to another vulnerability, distribution, because an app can survive even when its original repository is taken down.

But if people can't find it easily enough, install it or update it through the mainstream channels that they normally use, reaching users becomes much harder. We have seen this before. In Russia, in 2021, Apple and Google removed Alexi Navalny's smart voting apps, from their stores on the day that the voting began after pressure from Russian authorities. The app itself had not suddenly ceased to exist, but users could no longer get it through the two mainstream app stores. And this exposes a basic weakness in software distribution. Code can be copied more easily than the distribution infrastructure around it can be replaced.

And that brings us to the last layer, the phone itself. Android has historically been more permissive about installing apps from outside Google Play. Google is now changing that. And it says that the reason is security. Its own research found that more than 90 times more malware comes from internet's side-loaded sources than from Google Play. So Google is introducing developer verification. From 30th of September 26, in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, apps installed on certified Android devices would need to be registered by verified developers.

Google says that the system will expand globally from 2027. Now, this does not eliminate side loading. Unregistered apps can still be installed through an advanced process and developers can still use Android debug bridge or ADB. But the advanced process comes with additional security checks, including a one-time 24-hour wait. Now, for an ordinary Android user, that is a fairly reasonable security trade-off. But imagine somebody is trying to install a communication app during a protest after a shutdown.

A 24-hour delay is no longer just an inconvenience. And a developer who wants the normal installation experience now has another gate to pass through, registering with Google and verifying their identity. And this rule has nothing specifically to do with protests. Google says that it is designed to make Android. safer. But it also creates another point of contact between software and the company that controls the operating system. And that is the bigger story here. The technology used during protests does not have to be defeated at the same layer every time. When people find a way around the

network, the response can move to the software. When the software is harder to remove, distribution becomes the pressure point. And when people root around the app stores, the operating system becomes another layer that can shape what is. eventually reaches the phone. So the government can learn to follow the technology that is used for protests. But the interesting question is what happens when the technology itself keeps moving. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform.

What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription unlocks daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and podcasts. Head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by Snigna Sharma and edited by Arna Prakash.