On Friday, October 23, Bitchat ranked second among free apps on France’s App Store overall and first in the social networking category, ahead of Telegram, Signal, Threads and Discord. Its Android version had surpassed one million downloads on Google Play worldwide. The October 17 protests and the nationwide Orange and Sosh outage on October 21, which lasted from 11:20 a.m. to 9 p.m., boosted installations. The app uses a Bluetooth mesh network to relay messages from device to device without requiring an account, phone number or central server. Private messages are end-to-end encrypted, while public channels remain accessible to nearby users. India and China have had the app removed from their stores, but devices already equipped with it can continue relaying messages.
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