Message your group onboard, without buying wifi
Your phones talk straight to each other, over Bluetooth. No internet package, no signal, no account. It is free.
Free on the App Store How to set your group up
- Free, not a trial
- No account
- No ads
- Works with no internet
iPhone today. Android is built and in testing — join the Android test.
Watch it in twenty-four seconds
Why you would want it
Once the ship leaves port your phone has no usable signal, and the ship sells internet per person. A family of five pays five times. So one or two people buy it, everybody else does not, and the week is spent leaving notes on the cabin door and guessing where everyone is.
How a message actually gets there
This is the part people do not believe, so here it is drawn out. Your message does not go to the internet and back. It goes to the phones around you, and they pass it on.
If the ship's wifi network lets guests reach each other, your phones use that too — connected to the wifi, but with no package bought. Both routes work at the same time, and neither of them costs anything.
What it will not do
Being straight about this matters more than a feature list.
- It is not instant across a whole ship. A message reaches someone when phones come near enough, directly or through another phone in the group. Several decks apart with nobody in between, it waits.
- It only reaches your own group. It is not a way to message home, and not a way to reach strangers onboard.
- Everyone has to install it before you sail, while you still have a normal connection. That is the single most common reason a group never gets going.
- A locked iPhone on silent stays silent. Apple reserves the entitlement that lets an app override the silent switch, and we have not been granted it.
What we have measured
From testers' own phones, not from a brochure. One evening with six people moving around a venue with no shared wifi, a Samsung handset completed 317 message exchanges, every one over Bluetooth, and re-found the same two people every four to seven minutes. Battery, measured with the phone locked and nobody touching it, ran at 2.2% to 7.8% an hour — and that is the whole phone, not this app's share.
The one ship network we have tested on ourselves was P&O's Arvia, where guests could reach each other. We cannot promise that of every line, and we do not.
Who made it
A family who got tired of paying for ship wifi five times over, and then spent a year making the thing work properly. It is free because it costs almost nothing to run: there is no server holding your messages, because your phones are the network.
Start here
If you are wondering whether texting works at all onboard, read can you text on a cruise ship. Weighing up radios? Walkie talkies for cruise ships. Ready to go: how to set your group up before you sail.
Sailing a particular line? There is a page on P&O Cruises wifi and what it costs, one on Royal Caribbean's app chat, one on Carnival HUB chat, and a table of what every line charges.
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Free, no account, nothing to set up beyond your group. iPhone today; Android is built and in testing.
