Nearhold Coming soon
Find the people you came with and talk to them when there is no signal at all — a group radar and walkie-talkie for festivals, hikes and dead zones. Coming soon to Android.
📡 Find your group when there is no signal
Festivals, ridgelines, car parks the size of a village: the places you most need to find someone are the places with no bars. Nearhold shows where your group is and lets you talk to them without a network.
What it does
- A radar of your own group — direction and distance, not a map that needs data.
- Push-to-talk between phones with no carrier and no internet involved.
- Made for the dead zones: festivals, hikes, ski slopes and underground car parks.
Who it is for
Groups who split up somewhere with no coverage and would rather not agree on a meeting point and hope.
How two phones talk with no network at all
When there is no signal, a phone is not out of radios — it is out of one radio. The mast is gone, but the short-range transmitters are still there and they do not need a carrier, an account or a single byte of data.
Bluetooth is the low-power one. It reaches tens of metres, sips battery, and is good for knowing that someone is nearby and roughly which way.
Wi-Fi Direct lets two phones form a link between themselves with no router in the middle. Much more bandwidth, noticeably more battery, and the one that carries voice.
Range is about obstacles, not distance. These are short waves. Across an open field you may get a few hundred metres; through a building, a crowd or a hillside you may get a fraction of that. Line of sight is most of the answer.
Which is why the useful thing in a dead zone is usually not a map. A map needs tiles it may not have and a position it cannot share. Direction and distance to the people you came with is a smaller claim, and it is one a phone can actually keep when there is nothing else to lean on.
Questions people ask
How can it work without signal?
It talks phone to phone over short-range radio built into the handset rather than through a mobile network, so it works where there is no coverage at all.
When is it out?
It is in preparation for Google Play. The developer page is where it will appear first.