Failed attempts at censorship are the best thing that could ever happen to Bitchat: free advertising for a vibcoded and questionably secure entry in a space with plenty of competitors. As others have commented it's basically impossible to shut down an open source app by blocking the source distributor, but press is priceless.
I played around with Briar [1] for a while: it worked well, and had an option to install peer-to-peer without going through any app store, was sad to see that the authors put it in maintenance mode. It also had a security audit.