Wouldn't you rather use some actual radios for this? They make small PMR ones that aren't expensive, need no license/permit (in Germany at least) and have surprisingly good reach. We used a pair of these to communicate with people in a heavily reinforced concrete basement that blocked out cellular and data completely, and on hiking trips in the alps (though with a lot of rock in between you need at least something to reflect your signal, but that's still way better than yelling)
> But what I needed was a network independent app
Not sure if that's actually possible with decent reach. After all, I don't think you get direct control over iPhone/Apple Watch modems/transmitters and neither wifi nor bluetooth are optimized for this use case.
Bluetooth 5 has up to 1km performance at few hundred kbps. With good codecs thats near real time. Of course Apple doesn't support it.