Orbule Get Orbule

meet · match · move

The road goes further than the signal.

Swipe to match with travellers heading where you’re heading, share the road as you go, and keep talking after the bars drop to zero — relayed phone to phone across the local network, with no mast in it.

Get it on Google Play See how offline works iOS · coming soon
The Orbule feed: a travel video filling the screen, with like, comment, save and share controls down the right edge.
Every travel app assumes you have internet. The good parts of travelling are where you don’t.

Hostel basements. Overnight buses. Trailheads, ferries, festival fields, the last forty kilometres before the border. Orbule was built for the gaps — the places where a group chat goes quiet and nobody can find anybody.

Offline messaging

Your message travels by phone.

With no route to the internet, Orbule hands your message to whoever is nearby and lets them pass it on. Each phone that hears it relays it once more, up to five hops, until it reaches the person you wrote to — then sends a receipt back the same way.

What it needs is a shared local network and nothing beyond it: hostel Wi‑Fi with the bill unpaid, a bus hotspot, one phone’s tethering. No mast, no mobile data, no server in the loop.

  • Carried overLocal Wi‑Fi or hotspot
  • Internet neededNone
  • Maximum hops5
  • Peer identityEd25519 signed
  • Delivery receiptYes, back through the mesh
  • Mobile data usedNone
  • Bluetooth relay in progressNot yet live

Next: Bluetooth relay. The Wi‑Fi mesh still needs a network for phones to find each other on. Relaying over Bluetooth instead removes that last requirement — a trailhead, a ferry, a field with nothing in it at all. The receiving side is already built and the encryption is shared with the mesh; what is left is the advertising half, which needs a Bluetooth library that can run in peripheral mode.

Relay path hop 0/5

No mast, no server. Press Send a message to watch one travel.

Inside the app

Four screens you’ll live in.

The Discover screen, listing activity partners such as a coffee meetup and a hiking partner, with suggested people to follow below.
Discover
Buddy Up, showing a traveller's card with their destination and dates, and Skip or Match buttons.
Buddy Up
The AI assistant offering to plan a trip, calculate a budget or give safety tips, with rated Hidden Gems below.
AI Assistant
A profile page with follower, following and trip counts, and tabs for Videos and Trip Posts.
Profile

Swipe to see more →

Everything else

Built for the way people actually travel.

FEED

Full-screen video from the road

The view, the meal, the questionable hostel — one swipe each. Tag the city, never your exact coordinates, and save anything worth coming back to.

MESSAGES

Chat that arrives instantly

Direct messages over an encrypted live connection, with everything you write while offline queued and sent the moment you’re back.

COMMUNITIES

Groups for a route, not a country

Join the people doing the same trail, the same island hop, the same long weekend — and ask the question you can’t google.

TRIPS

A record that outlasts the trip

Trip plans become trip archives: where you went, who you met, what it cost. Yours to keep, and yours to delete.

Where your data goes

Short answer: almost nowhere.

Orbule carries no advertising SDK and no third-party analytics. Nobody is paying us for your movements, so there is nothing to collect them for.

  • No ad or analytics SDKs Not one, in the shipped app. Your sessions aren’t profiled or resold.
  • City, not coordinates Location is only read when you tag a post, and it’s turned into “city, region, country” on your phone before anything is sent.
  • Encrypted in transit Every request and every live chat frame travels over TLS to api.orbule.com. Plain HTTP is refused by the app outright.
  • Signed offline identities Peers on the mesh verify each other with public keys published while online, so a stranger in range can’t impersonate your friend and unsigned messages are dropped, not delivered.
  • Delete it all, from inside the app Settings → Delete Account removes your posts, messages, photos and profile. No email, no waiting on support.
  • No backups to scrape Android backup is disabled for Orbule, so your account data never lands in a cloud backup you forgot you had.
The Orbule app icon

Free · Android

Go somewhere. Stay findable.

Orbule is free, carries no ads, and works whether or not there’s a bar of signal on the screen.

Get it on Google Play