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I remember when sending messages and files through IR was a standard default feature in (dump) phones two decades ago. It is a bit sad how technology in some ways regresses when certain anti-incentives apply.

by miki12321139 minutes ago|

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Bitchat and IRDA solve very different problems.

IRDA is 1-to-1 and basically requires both users to do nothing else but use IRDA (including being within line-of-sight of each other). For a use case like talking to a family member a few seats over on a plane, IRDA won't help you.

Bitchat, at least in principle, doesn't require you to sacrifice the entirety of your phone to constantly run Bitchat in the foreground, and can work over larger distances (and with a mesh architecture which lets you reach people that you wouldn't normally be able to reach).

Writing an app that has the equivalent of 2000s-era functionality is a day of work at most. You don't even need to, you can achieve similar objectives via Airdrop / hotspot names (the latter being used as a loophole to communicate across prison cells). This is not what Bitchat is.

by freehorse30 minutes ago|

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I did not mean to say bitchat does the same, but that mainstream technology moved away from direct p2p, that could have evolved to sth like bitchat, to mediated modes of communication. Instead eg mainstream technology going from 1-1 IR to a mesh architecture of communication, we got cloud, proprietary platform-specific protocols/apps etc.