be here

What it is

be here is a shared space for whoever is around you. There's a common feed anyone nearby can post to, private messages between people, public profiles, and guestbook walls you can write on.

What you write goes to the phones near you, and each of those passes it on to the phones near them. It travels as far as people carry it.

Someone who arrives an hour later still reads what was said, because the phones that heard it kept it. The app never asks where you are.

It doesn't need the internet

Phones find each other directly over Bluetooth and peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, and every phone relays what it receives to the phones near it. Each person running the app extends the reach by another hop.

No servers. No accounts.

Where it's useful

Apartment buildings, campgrounds, concerts, festivals, airports, national parks, and neighborhoods — places where people are already together but have no practical way to reach each other. It also keeps working during an outage, on a plane, or anywhere with no signal.

Privacy

Your profile is stored on your phone and nowhere else. Private messages are encrypted before they leave it, so the phones that relay them cannot read them.

Range

A hop is one direct link between two phones. Any phone that receives a post relays it onward, so in a crowd a message travels well past the radio that sent it.

Wi-Fi Aware requires hardware support, which most flagship Android phones have had since around 2018; phones without it fall back to Bluetooth. Best case assumes outdoors with clear line of sight, and walls, bodies and weather all reduce it.