Fiskos

Offline chat for your people: groups, photos, plans. No internet, no account.

Live

A messenger that keeps working the moment the signal and the Wi-Fi are gone.

Maker's note

It came out of a holiday with my wife. The hotel's internet was terrible, and sending each other a photo while sitting side by side meant pushing it through that terrible internet: WhatsApp puts its server in the middle even when both phones are in the same room. The flight home was the same thing in another shape — sitting next to each other, both phones on, nothing we could do together on them.

Fiskos was written for exactly those two scenes. When two phones in the same room can already see each other, putting a server between them is pointless: the photo, the shared list, the trip's expense tally and the game you play on the plane can all go straight across.

What building it taught me is that working without the internet is not a feature you add, it is a constraint. With no account, who is the user? With no server, who decides the order of messages? If two phones edit the same list at once, which one is right? None of these have an off-the-shelf answer, and the whole app ended up built around them.

What it does

No servers, nobody in the middle

Most apps route your conversations through their servers. Fiskos does not: your messages and everything you share live only on your phones, end-to-end encrypted. There is nothing in the middle to hack, subpoena or leak.

There is no account to create and no phone number to hand over. Privacy here is not a setting, it is where the app is built from.

How the no-internet part actually works

Fiskos connects the phones of people who are in the same place: over one Wi-Fi network, over one phone's hotspot, or with neither of those, directly phone to phone over Wi-Fi Direct, with no router at all.

So it is built for “we are together but there is no signal”, not for messaging someone on the other side of the world. You pair once, which works off-grid too, and that is it.

Everything in one shared space

Offline messages, photos, files and voice messages
One-to-one and group chats
Voice and video calls over the local Wi-Fi
Backgammon, Chess and Ludo, played head to head
A shared calendar with reminders and an Upcoming view
Shared lists: packing, shopping, to-dos
Split expenses with an automatic who-owes-who
Location sharing and a live radar to find each other
A shared note, and an app lock with fingerprint, face or PIN

Made for

Gym crews: basement gyms kill the signal
Travel: abroad with no SIM, in the same hotel, car or street
Camping and festivals: the crowd where the cell network dies
Couples: a private two-person space, a shared list and calendar
Housemates and family: who is buying what, the calendar, the chores
Small teams: a stall, a film set, an event crew in a dead-zone building

Free, with an optional Fiskos Pro

Everything above is free. A one-time Fiskos Pro unlocks large-file and full-length video sharing, and because it sponsors your circle, one person buys it and everyone they pair with gets it too. No subscription, no ads.

Details

Platform: Android phone
Transport: Wi-Fi, hotspot, Wi-Fi Direct
Internet: Not required
Account: None
Encryption: End to end
Price: Free
Version: 0.4.61 · 15 Aug 2026