What would be the use case? Send the picture to someone at the other end of the lecture theatre? It's likely that there would be a phone network or Wi-Fi available. A crisis or emergency situation where networks are down? There isn't much population density or movement to propagate the data.
This debate is not new, many teams have worked on wireless ad hoc networks, some with very encouraging results. The real problem is what the use cases are.
That's why I personally think that the use case should be related to travel, transport, sport or vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Situations involving movement and loss of connectivity.
Now you're back to using a centralised system using a network you know nothing about, operated by someone you don't know.
> direct Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection or an AirDrop
AirDrop is not cross platform AFAIK. Direct wifi or bluetooth aren't the easiest to work with for non-technical users.
> A crisis or emergency situation where networks are down? There isn't much population density or movement to propagate the data.
Why not? Do emergencies only occur when people are few and far between? I think I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
> That's why I personally think that the use case should be related to travel, transport, sport or vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Situations involving movement and loss of connectivity.
That's certainly a valuable use case, but probably not something that bitchat would be useful for.
It doesn't work very well from a technical and practical point of view. Just having the app on your phone could be enough to get you charged in a totalitarian state.
So it's interesting, but it's not the use case that will democratise this type of ad-hoc network. For example, it is easier to implement end-to-end encryption on an existing infrastructure.
There must be a use case where there is no network connection, enough network participants, and that can accommodate a significant transmission delay.
