Meshbell carries verified neighborhood emergency bulletins over a local radio mesh — and lets your street check in safe, share resource lists, and coordinate — even 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.
Check in safe, share resource lists, and post to the board — native, right in the app. No browser, no account, works over the local bridge.
One field across alerts, the board, resource lists, and your places. Find the shelter list or that one warning without scrolling 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. A guided setup stands it up on a Raspberry Pi, and the app finds it for every neighbor automatically.
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.
Coordination now lives right in the app — a Neighborhood tab next to Alerts, no browser and no account. When your street's bridge is up, the app finds it and opens a light layer for the practical work of an emergency: who's accounted for, where the shelter is, who needs a hand.
One tap to check in safe. What everyone sees is a running count and nothing more — "12 of about 40 households checked in." No names, no addresses, no locations, no map of who's home. Counts stay hidden until a handful have checked in, so no one can be singled out.
Shelter and warming spots, water and supplies, power and charging, and a self-listed "who can help" — the neighbor with a chainsaw, the nurse two doors down. Anyone on the bridge can add and edit them together.
Offers, requests, questions, and updates — each post tagged to a channel and filtered by how recent it is, so a busy street stays scannable instead of a wall to scroll. Post under whatever name you type.
When phones die, the bridge prints a one-page snapshot — the roll-call count, the resource lists, the latest board — to tape to a door or a community board. Coordination that survives a dead battery.
No app? A neighbor with only a browser still reaches the same roll-call, lists, and board over the bridge's installable web app. How the coordination layer works →
One bottom bar — Alerts, Neighborhood, Search, Mesh, Places — laid out to Apple's own guidelines, with plain-language Help one tap away. Nothing to hunt for when it matters.
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 TestFlight beta for iPhone, closing in on its 1.0. It runs today with or without mesh radios — the radios extend its reach when the network is down.
Meshbell