Meshbell

Meshbell is a neighborhood emergency-alert app built for the moment the network fails. 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.

WORKS WHEN THE NETWORK DOESN'T Meshbell carries small, signed emergency bulletins over a local long-range radio mesh (LoRa). A warning can enter the mesh anywhere and hop radio-to-radio across the neighborhood — no tower, no router, no account. Your phone receives it and checks it, offline.

VERIFIED, NOT VIRAL Most apps show you a claim and let the styling imply it is true. Meshbell keeps two facts separate and visible: who is speaking, and whether it could be checked. 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 is not treated as official unless it proves it. This is built into the app, not a policy it remembers to follow.

FOLLOW THE PLACES YOU CARE ABOUT Add your home, or a family member's street. Meshbell tells you about hazards that touch a place you watch, on your lock screen if they are serious enough — and stays quiet about the rest. Official warnings come from the National Weather Service, and a neighborhood bridge can add FEMA IPAWS in the United States or MeteoAlarm across Europe, in the issuing service's own words.

REACH NEIGHBORS WITHOUT A RADIO One prepared neighbor can bootstrap the block. Set up a small Wi-Fi bridge on a Raspberry Pi (the installer ships inside the app), and anyone nearby with just a browser can read the mesh — nothing to install, and a neighbor's signed report is still checked on their own device.

BUILT FOR THE WORST HOUR No cell, no Wi-Fi, an old phone, a nearly dead battery — Meshbell still works, and it tells you plainly what it can and cannot do. When data is stale, it says so, with its age, rather than showing a confident blank.

A PUBLIC GOOD, NOT A PRODUCT 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 or turn your neighborhood into a mailing list. Your keys and your watched places stay on your device.

Meshbell is an early release and is not a substitute for official emergency services or alerts. Keep your existing emergency notifications turned on.