This post is a statement of motivation. It is not a technical note. It is not a release. It is an answer to a question we get often and that we would rather answer once, in plain sentences, than paraphrase in footnotes.
Hoppr is an encrypted peer-to-peer messenger. The company behind it is incorporated in the Gulf. Before we chose a market, a target user, or a feature set, we chose a reference user. That reference user was a family in Gaza trying to reach another family in Gaza on a night when the network was down.
The documented facts
Since October 2023, Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip have been accompanied by repeated and deliberate telecommunications blackouts. This is not an interpretation. It is the record.
Fibre cables carrying internet traffic into the strip have been cut. Mobile data has been throttled and, at several points, switched off entirely across whole governorates for hours and sometimes days. Cell towers have been damaged or destroyed. NetBlocks, Access Now, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and Paltel itself have all reported on these events in real time. The New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and Human Rights Watch have all described the same pattern across different months of the same campaign.
During those blackout windows, journalists could not file. Paramedics could not coordinate ambulance dispatch. Families could not confirm that relatives two streets away were still alive. International observers could not verify what had happened overnight until the wire came back up. The blackouts are themselves a weapon, because they take the last witness out of the room.
What a messenger cannot do
We want to be clear about this before anything else. Hoppr does not break a siege. Hoppr does not feed a child. Hoppr does not stop a bomb or a shell or a drone. An app cannot undo a blockade. Pretending otherwise would be offensive, and we do not pretend.
If you are reading this and you have the capacity to send food, water, medicine, or fuel to the people of Gaza, or to pressure the governments that can, please do that first. A messenger is a thin thing next to a truck of flour.
What a messenger can do when the wire is cut
What Hoppr can do is narrow, specific, and occasionally decisive.
Every modern phone is also a short-range Bluetooth radio. That radio does not need a cell tower. It does not need a fibre cable. It does not need anyone's permission. Two phones in the same room can exchange encrypted messages directly. If a third phone is in range, the message hops. If a fourth is in range of the third, it hops again. Given enough devices in a neighbourhood, a message can travel across a district without a single packet crossing a cellular network or the public internet.
That is what Hoppr does. It is small. It is slow compared to a working LTE signal. It is not a replacement for the internet. But in the hours when the wire is cut, it is the difference between a silence that is weaponised and a family saying "we are still here".
Medics can coordinate. Neighbourhood committees can share where the last functioning water pipe is. Journalists can queue their dispatches locally, signed and timestamped, and transmit them in the seconds of uplink that follow. None of this requires trusting us, because the traffic is end-to-end encrypted and we do not have the keys.
Why we are explicit about solidarity
We have thought about whether to keep this page neutral, to describe the tool in the passive voice, and let the user supply their own politics. We decided not to.
When a state cuts a wire, that is a choice about who is allowed to be heard. That choice is political. Describing a tool that routes around the cut without naming the cut would be a kind of laundering. It would let us collect the engineering credit without the moral position, and it would, quietly, put our thumb on the scale of the people doing the cutting.
We have an opinion on that choice. Our opinion is that the people inside Gaza have a right to speak, to be heard, to record what happens to them, and to contact the outside world, and that a siege which includes their voices is worse than a siege which does not. We built the tool for the people on the wrong side of the cut. We say so here because hiding it would be dishonest.
Beyond Gaza
The pattern is not unique to Gaza. Sudan has seen nationwide blackouts during the war between the army and the RSF. Myanmar's junta has cut entire townships off the internet for years. Iran has thrown the switch during every major wave of protest since 2019. Ethiopia, Kashmir, Xinjiang, Belarus, and several others sit on the same list.
Hoppr is for all of them. A tool built to work in Gaza works in Khartoum, in Yangon, in Tehran, in Srinagar. The cut looks different in each place; the shape of the response is the same. Encrypted, local, no central server, no kill switch.
What we will not do
We will not withdraw Hoppr from any region because it becomes politically inconvenient. We will not add a regional licence check. We will not geofence. We will not comply with any request, from any government, to make Hoppr stop working in a particular postcode.
Mechanically, we could not do this even if we wanted to. Once the app is on a device, no remote action of ours can take it away. There is no App Store kill switch that applies to a sideloaded Android APK. A Hoppr build distributed peer-to-peer continues to work whether or not our servers, our domain, or our company still exist. This is a design property, not an accident.
Closing
Solidarity without a concrete plan is sentiment. A plan without solidarity is a product pitch. We tried to write both at the same time, in the same sentences, in the same code. This post is the part where we say out loud what is already true in the repository.
If you are in a place where the wire has been cut, Hoppr is yours. You do not need to ask us. You do not need to tell us. That was the point.