Meshbell carries verified neighborhood emergency bulletins over a local radio mesh — so a warning still reaches your street when cell and internet are down.
Floods, fires, and outages take cell towers and home internet with them — exactly when a neighborhood most needs to talk to itself. Meshbell doesn't depend on either.
During the 2024 floods, a screenshot mislabeling a hotel lobby as a hospital went viral in minutes. Meshbell is built so the app can never turn a rumor into an instruction.
It reaches out before you think to check — a warning finds you, you don't hunt for it.
No cell, no Wi-Fi, an old phone, a dying battery — it still works, and it tells you plainly what it can and can't do.
People, edge devices, and responders share one honest picture — no single point that has to stay online.
Every bulletin is signed and checked on your device. What can't be verified is shown as exactly that — never dressed up as fact.
A warning enters the mesh anywhere and hops radio-to-radio across the neighborhood — no tower, no router, no account required.
A neighbor's report or a weather-service alert becomes a small, signed bulletin.
Low-power radios pass it hop to hop across the neighborhood. Any phone or node with a moment of signal can bridge it to the wider world.
Meshbell decodes the bulletin and verifies its signature on your device. Nothing has to be online for this to work.
Confirmed by neighbors, official, or unverified — always labeled, never guessed.
Add your home or a family member's street. Serious, verified hazards that touch them reach your lock screen; the rest stays in the feed.
Every alert's signature is checked on your phone — even in a browser over the bridge. The network is never trusted to say what's true.
Enroll each other in person by scanning a QR and comparing a short fingerprint aloud. That's the whole security model — no directory of who lives where.
The Wi-Fi bridge installer ships inside the app. One prepared neighbor stands it up on a Raspberry Pi, and everyone with a browser is on the mesh.
Walk out of range, a radio reboots, interference hits — the connection re-establishes itself and keeps listening, no re-tapping.
No cell, no Wi-Fi, an old phone, a dying battery — it still works, and labels stale data with its age instead of a confident blank.
The app never launders a rumor into an instruction.
Most apps show you a claim and let the styling imply it's true. Meshbell keeps two facts separate and visible: who is speaking, and whether we could check it. An unconfirmed neighbor report is shown as exactly that. Only a message that clears a real cryptographic bar can ever carry an instruction — and even a relayed official alert isn't treated as official unless it proves it. This isn't a policy we remember to follow; it's built into the code so it can't be skipped.
Meshbell is built as a nonprofit, in the spirit of Watch Duty: the core alerting is free and always will be. We will never sell your emergency, gate a life-safety feature behind a paywall, or turn your neighborhood into a mailing list.
Donations and low-cost mesh hardware fund the radios and infrastructure a neighborhood needs — never the alerts themselves.
Meshbell is in early TestFlight beta for iPhone. It runs today with or without mesh radios — the radios extend its reach when the network is down.
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