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omegant | 4 years ago

For certain moments and limited groups the inmediate playing could be very useful, like a group of people skying or in a job site where you need inmediate communication at a distance when installing something, not office work, more contractor like situation: “please bring the box from the trunk” or something like that. Last vacations I was looking for something like this while skiing in Andorra with friends, as each call is in roaming and extremely expensive (like 8-10€ per call) But what I needed was a network independent app, and I couldn’t find one. So I guess this app fails short for Me anyway as it uses Facetime.

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dividedbyzero|4 years ago

> like a group of people skying or in a job site where you need inmediate communication at a distance when installing something, not office work, more contractor like situation: “please bring the box from the trunk” or something like that.

Wouldn't you rather use some actual radios for this? They make small PMR ones that aren't expensive, need no license/permit (in Germany at least) and have surprisingly good reach. We used a pair of these to communicate with people in a heavily reinforced concrete basement that blocked out cellular and data completely, and on hiking trips in the alps (though with a lot of rock in between you need at least something to reflect your signal, but that's still way better than yelling)

> But what I needed was a network independent app

Not sure if that's actually possible with decent reach. After all, I don't think you get direct control over iPhone/Apple Watch modems/transmitters and neither wifi nor bluetooth are optimized for this use case.

dzhiurgis|4 years ago

> bluetooth are optimized for this use case.

Bluetooth 5 has up to 1km performance at few hundred kbps. With good codecs thats near real time. Of course Apple doesn't support it.

omegant|4 years ago

Yes, modern PMR can be very good amd afordable, and I own 4 of them!. But for this trip I couldn’t take them with me and was looking for a mobile phone solution. I guess you are right and they simply don’t have the power..