A 17-year-old builds a free app that keeps people in touch when phone networks fail
Emirhan Duman, a student in Istanbul, built Crisis Connect after the 2023 earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria: messages hop from phone to phone over Bluetooth until they reach the right person. It is free and open source.
When the earthquakes struck southern Türkiye and northern Syria on 6 February 2023, phone masts and internet links were knocked out just when people needed them most. Emirhan Duman, a secondary school student in Istanbul who is now 17, watched from hundreds of miles away and decided to do something about it. The result is Crisis Connect, a free app that lets phones talk to each other directly over Bluetooth when there is no signal or internet.
The idea is simple: two phones close together can communicate without a mast. Switch on mesh mode and each phone can pass messages on to another nearby, so they hop from device to device until they arrive. Mesh mode is off by default to save battery and can be turned on in an emergency.
Duman described the project himself on PreventionWeb, the knowledge platform of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), in its community voices section. He says he started building it in April 2025 and that it took him about a year.
What it does
The app offers encrypted messages, voice calls, live location sharing and SOS alerts, and works without an account or a central server. It is best set up in advance: you connect with family, neighbours or teammates by scanning a QR code or pairing nearby. It is available on the App Store and Google Play, and the code is open source, so any developer can check or improve it.
What it can’t do
Duman is clear about the limits: the app does not replace satellite links, emergency radio or official early warning systems. Bluetooth has a short range, and the mesh only works if enough phones with the app are near each other. His aim, he says, is to fill a gap in the first hours after a disaster, when networks go down and every message counts. There are no public figures yet on how many people use it, and it has not been tested in a real disaster. PreventionWeb notes that the views in the article are the author’s, not the UN’s.
