New | 'Off-the-grid' messaging application FireChat continues to ride Occupy boost
FireChat has seen explosive growth in Hong Kong since it became the app of choice last week in the city's Occupy Central pro-democracy movement.
FireChat, a mobile messaging application that does not rely on data networks or Internet connections to operate, has seen explosive growth in Hong Kong since it became the app of choice last week in the city's Occupy Central pro-democracy movement.
Over the last week, FireChat has been downloaded 460,000 times in the city, according to Christophe Daligault, vice-president of sales and marketing of the app’s developer Open Garden.
With a poulation of just over 7 million, Hong Kong has now become the second-largest market for the application in terms of downloads, behind the United States and ahead of India. Mainland China ranks fifth, while Taiwan ranks ninth in downloads.
Protest organisers in Hong Kong had first called on demonstrators to download the app as rumours circulated on Sunday that the government might shut down mobile phone networks and Internet connections in districts hit by protests.
FireChat connects users to chat rooms via Bluetooth or Wi-fi, even if they are not connected to mobile phone networks. Messages go online and can reach a global audience if individual users in chat rooms gain access to the internet.
While there was no evidence of large-scale Internet or mobile network outage in Hong Kong in the past week, participants and supporters of Occupy Central continued to download and use the app.
In the week ending on Saturday, Hongkongers participated in 5.1 million chat sessions on FireChat, Daligault said. At peak times, as many as 37,000 Hongkongers used the app simultaneously, mostly sharing updates on the pro-democracy protests in the city.
FireChat gained its first popularity boost in Taiwan, only days after its launch in March. Students protesters in the island’s “Sunflower Movement” occupied the legislature in Taipei, calling for a halt to a new cross-straits trade agreement that would further link Taiwan’s economy to that of mainland China.
Protesters downloaded the app en masse as they feared the authorities might shut down the mobile network to prevent students from spreading their message from the occupied legislature. That didn't happen either.
Despite its popularity in such social movements, the application is not without fault, said Ben Cheng, co-founder of Hong Kong software company Oursky.
“Fire chat is a public chat, it is a bit difficult to discover new rooms and a lot of chat rooms are spammed with repetitive or false information,” said Cheng.
The protests have helped developers improve their application, Daligault said. “The immediate priority is to introduce trusted voices on FireChat,” he said. “This comes in the form of verified accounts. Such accounts are meant for people who want to join the discussions under their real name, specifically journalists and reporters.”
“The students have also asked us to improve the user experience with very practical things such as time-stamps, and make messages easier to read when there are too many people on FireChat at once,” he said.
However, users have also raised privacy concerns. “FireChat can be used by anyone within the same area, it is hard to distinguish who is who in the chat room, so sharing classified messages in FireChat will be unwise as you will never know who are you speaking to and there maybe someone peeking there,” said Glacier Kwong, a member of Keyboard Frontline, a Hong Kong-based internet freedom advocate group.
“FireChats are public, like tweets,” said Daligault. “People who want to remain anonymous can and should use pseudonyms.”
He said developers were working on adding a private messaging function.
