[gh0st42]

Making LoRa (not LoRaWAN) available to smartphones can also be achieved through general purpose modem firmwares for, e.g., esp32 boards that also contain lora transceivers.

The rf95modem firmware exposes LoRa for D2D communication via serial/usb or BLE with AT modem commands and works with many different boards. https://github.com/gh0st42/rf95modem

Full disclaimer: I am the author of rf95modem :)

[KennyBlanken]

It's a bit of a shame that you started another LoRa based messaging system instead of contributing to the several existing projects.

None of them has achieved critical mass, and none of them will if everyone interested in the subject insists on making their own.

Andreas Spiess covers several mesh networking/messaging systems here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY6m6fS8bxU

[gh0st42]

Well, I started this in 2017 and the first public release was in 2018, so it's been around for quite a while and also predates Andreas video. Furthermore, it is not meant (just) for messaging, one of our example apps was indeed a messenger but the firmware itself just gives easy ways to send and receive data. We wanted to keep any application logic out of the firmware to make it general purpose (and maintainable).

[eternityforest]

I was under the impression that Meshtastic was mostly considered the winner these days. Is that not the case?

[entropy47]

https://xkcd.com/927/