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Red Grid Link

peer-to-peer team tracking over Bluetooth, no servers

Details

External ID
47461529
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Red Grid Link
Website domain
github.com
Launched
March 20, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
54
Upvotes percentile
0.8437884378843789
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I go on a lot of backcountry trips where I barely get cell service. If my group splits, nobody knows knows where anyone is until you regroup at camp or at your destination. You can buy Garmin radios or try to set up an ATAK, but ATAK is Android-only and assumes you have a TAK Server running somewhere to make use of all of the functionality. Cool tools themselves, but expensive to set up correctly. I just wanted two iPhones to share their location directly over Bluetooth when cell coverage was lacking.Red Grid Link does that. Start a session, and anyone nearby running the app shows up on your offline map. When they walk out of range their marker stays as a "ghost" that slowly fades.The hard part was making sync reliable over BLE. The connections drop all the time. Someone turns a corner, walks behind a vehicle, whatever. I built a CRDT sync layer (LWW Register + G-Counter) so there's never merge conflicts. Each update is just under 200 bytes (from what I have tested so far). When a user/teammate disappears the app does exponential backoff from 2 to 30 seconds before giving up and marking them as a ghost.Everything is encrypted (AES-256-GCM, ECDH P-256 key exchange per peer pair). Sessions can require a PIN or QR code to join. It also offers offline topo maps with MGRS grid coordinates, same system as in my other app, Red Grid MGRS.The app is free, and I'm looking for some honest feedback from other real-world users. Let me know if you have any questions!

Enrichment

Theme
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Communication
Audience
B2B
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
decentralized team location tracking
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While mobile UI and standard geolocation APIs are straightforward, creating a robust, serverless peer-to-peer Bluetooth mesh network across mixed iOS and Android devices requires specialized low-level BLE protocol engineering.

What it would actually take: A production app requires React Native or native Swift/Kotlin integrating BLE mesh libraries (such as Apple CoreBluetooth and Android BLE APIs) with custom peer discovery, routing, and message gossip algorithms. The hard part is managing OS-level BLE background execution restrictions, battery drain, and cross-platform mesh fragmentation without a central coordination server.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Meshtastic (LoRa hardware), what3words (coordinate phrases)

Concerns raised: BLE range limited compared to LoRa transceivers, iOS only currently, Android version delayed, Project abandonment risk, Battery drain in active mode, Reproducible builds not yet implemented

Feature requests: WiFi fallback when out of BLE range, BLE Long Range (Coded PHY) for 400m-1km range, Meshtastic bridge for LoRa multi-kilometer routing, Additional map tile sources including OpenStreetMap, Open alternative to what3words for offline coordinate phrases

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 80 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #20 of 81 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 135 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product