Bitchat has vanished from the Apple and Google app stores in India. The government ordered Apple to block access to the app under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act.
So what makes Bitchat different from WhatsApp and most other messaging apps? Almost all of them need the internet to work. Bitchat doesn't. It runs on Bluetooth Low Energy mesh networking, so phones that are close to each other can connect directly. A message can hop from one phone to the next, passing through several devices without touching the regular internet at all.You also don't need a phone number or any kind of account to use it.
That design makes it genuinely useful when the internet goes
down or gets shut off. But it also makes monitoring, interception and tracing
who said what much harder, and that's likely what caught the government's
attention.
The Internet Freedom Foundation has pushed back on the move.
Its argument is that Section 69A is meant for dealing with unlawful content,
not for banning a communication technology just because it's hard to intercept.
Pulling Bitchat from the official app stores certainly makes life harder for ordinary users, since they can no longer easily install or update it. But that doesn't mean the technology is gone. Android apps can be shared outside Google Play, and open-source code can be copied before repositories are taken down. Phones that already have a working version installed can still talk to nearby devices over Bluetooth, because there's no central server holding the whole thing together.This points to a bigger problem for governments dealing with decentralised tech.
