CampPing is a Bluetooth messaging protocol for the moments when cell networks are congested, absent, or switched off. Every phone is both broadcaster and listener, passing messages hand to hand at roughly 30 meters per hop. No tower, no ISP, no sky view, no dedicated hardware.
This page is an orientation. The project site at campping.wanessalabs.com has the FAQ, the use cases, and a comparison with other mesh messengers. Its /docs section is the outline of the protocol litepaper: the protocol overview, security model, message format, and compression spec. Those pages are placeholders for now and fill in as the test campaign produces numbers.
The Two Ideas
Delivery confirmation. Ack and relay report that a message arrived. Most phone mesh apps flood a broadcast outward and hope. For search and rescue or incident response, “did it arrive” is the whole question, and an unconfirmed send is a guess wearing the costume of a message.
The relay hub. A Windows machine can run as an always-on relay node with a dashboard, aggregating and forwarding traffic per device. A hub anchors a fixed space such as a venue or an incident command post, and backstops the mesh when phones sleep. This matters because Apple suspends Bluetooth advertising when an app leaves the foreground, so a phone-only mesh quietly degrades the moment people pocket their phones. The hub is the mitigation, and it is also where the commercial line sits: the protocol is open, the operational layer is not.
What Is Not Here Yet
The protocol has not received an independent security audit, and no measured performance figures are published. Both are deliberate. The test plan names what will be measured: delivery rate by hop count, ack round-trip latency, throughput after compression, battery cost per hour relaying, and the iOS degradation curve, each with and without a hub. The pass thresholds are still drafts, and they will be fixed before testing starts so the results cannot move the goalposts. Publishing before measuring is how this category earned its credibility problem, so the numbers appear when they exist and not before.
Until the audit is published, the protocol is not positioned for high-risk users. That is a standing rule with a written trigger.
Who It Is For
Event and festival operations teams first, then volunteer search and rescue and disaster response, then county and state emergency management, then defense integrators in the ATAK ecosystem. Consumers will use it free, permanently, by design: the organizations responsible for other people’s safety are the ones who pay.