I recently took a flight with family- on a budget airline that did not have Wifi, so we could not hop on WiFi and message each other using Signal. I wondered what other options there would be in the air- and remembered Bluetooth Communication apps- and had everyone install Briar- it came in haandy!

I like the built in Bridge option as well, (when the app communicates over the internet) to help avoid revealing the traffic is Tor traffic.

I have been impressed by the range of Briar- with a clear line of site, easily hundreds and hundreds of feet- i tested it to well over 500 outside- and on the plane , my family was scattered, but that was no issue at all. (More recently though i've detected my own Bluetooth MotoTag trackers from my luggage in Cargo holds while on planes, so Bluetooth indeed works well on planes.)

-I have heard of but have never used BridgeFy, which I know was a well known famous Bluetooth app that competed with Briar in the past. To my understanding it isn't quite as secure or open source.

There is a informative post here https://old.reddit.com/r/Briar/comments/gxiffy/what_exactly_... where a developer noted Briar's capabilities at that time- it seems due to some changes on the OS/phone Hardware end, and whatnot- and due to the phones only passing messages to contact nearby - Briar is not a true mesh networking app. It is a shame- i feel a true Bluetooth mesh networking app would be unstoppable in availability -though it might be a bit of a battery drain.

It is a shame Briar isn't on iOS also -

I also wish Signal would eventually consider communicating over any medium accessible- they would probably run into similar issue Briar has.

What will it take to get a Peer-to-Peer capable Bluetooth/Wifi/Celluar network using/(more possibly in the future)- proper optional mesh networking, Tor capable, VPN friendly, wholly end to end encrypted ,perfect forward secrecy including, fully open source App providing messaging (with the 'accounts' that Briar uses?), for Android and ios?(And Let's throw in PC Mac and Linux, so laptops could have a extremely user friendly user accessible way of doing this as well.)

Better yet, add Calling capability- i don't know how rough doing video calls would be over some methods like modern day Bluetooth- but even a rough capability would be used a little and be worth adding to the collection of things one could do(Briar is only Messaging at the time of this post- which is something notable for sure,as very few apps let you transmit solely thru Bluetooth<I have not heavily looked into the shared Wifi communication abilities of Briar at this point in time> - but more could be added in some form...I observe apps do exist that allow for Bluetooth calling or act like "Bluetooth" Walkie Talkies)