The Word of God freely shared
No internet or extra hardware required.
Why offline matters
Nearly a billion people can’t afford to download audio or sign-language video Bibles.
Across the Last Mile, internet poverty is the norm.
Source: internetpoverty.io
How it works
Freely Receive. Freely Give. Together.
Western Bible apps are built for personal Bible engagement. ethnē is built for community Bible sharing — because in the Last Mile, faith spreads the way life happens: in community.
The Setting: A discipleship group gathers under a tree in East Africa. No church building, no internet — a dozen believers, and the phones already in their pockets.
01
The app is shared, offline
A new disciple receives the ethnē app from the friend who invited her, by Bluetooth — no internet, no app store.
02
Join the Sharing Circle
The leader opens the ethnē app and creates a Sharing Circle from his phone; one by one, they scan the QR code and join. iPhone and Android, together.
03
Everyone brings, everyone receives
One brings Ruth the Foreigner Who Believed, another the audio of The Birth of Jesus. Whatever anyone shares, anyone can receive in minutes.
04
Beyond the discipleship group
She listens in her language and passes it on just as she received it. Where there’s no smartphone, Scripture still travels by Bluetooth or memory card.
The software solution
Hardware adds. Software multiplies.
Hardware can be deployed strategically where it’s needed. But nearly every family in the Last Mile now has a phone — so the Word can travel without any special device at all.
Software made to multiply
- No cost to the ministry, no cost to the next disciple.
- Runs on the phone she already owns — no shipping or customs delays.
- Native to the community — it doesn’t draw suspicion.
- The Word is entrusted from one person to the next — disciples making disciples (2 Timothy 2:2).
Built in the Last Mile
How We Built It
We found the pattern.
We noticed refugees sharing music and videos phone to phone, and the research showed SHAREit, an offline file-sharing app, was a top-20 download across the Last Mile. (the research)
MVP App Developed
Our first app had no server at all and passed Scripture peer to peer, and we watched it move through new generations of disciples in communities without a church.Technical approach: Wi-Fi P2P on Android.
Offline App Share 1.0
Now running in 7 custom apps across the Last Mile.Technical approach: Android’s hotspot API with a Kotlin Ktor web server running inside the app.
Now we’re building 2.0.
Cross-platform support including iOS, and a smoother first connection between phones, even across the many different Android devices in the field.Technical approach: Please see details below.
The 2.0 build is funded and guided by our Last Mile Advisory Group, and we’re recruiting Silicon Valley technology advisors.
Part 2 · Under the hood
Our Technical Approach
Every user is literally a server.
Phone-to-phone sharing usually reaches for specialized radios — Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Aware, Bluetooth transfer. In practice these vary by manufacturer and OS version, and they break most often on exactly the Android devices common in the Last Mile.
With our 2.0 approach, the sharing phone runs an ordinary HTTPS server inside the app, and a receiving phone just needs to be on the same Wi-Fi. Fewer moving parts, fewer points of failure — pragmatically simple, and resilient across a fragmented ecosystem.
The 2.0 Spec Sheet
Platforms
Android 6.0+ and iOS 15.6+ phones and tablets, from a single Kotlin Multiplatform codebase — one sharing implementation behaving identically on both sides of a share.
Transport
Standard Wi-Fi — a shared local network or a one-tap local-only hotspot (no SIM, no router, no internet). Joiners scan a Wi-Fi QR code; devices find each other over mDNS/DNS-SD with resilient fallbacks (gateway probing, subnet sweeps, peer gossip) for real-world networks where multicast fails.
Server
An embedded Ktor (Kotlin) web server running inside the app on every sharing device, serving the same sync and media endpoints as ethnē online — to a receiving phone, a nearby friend is indistinguishable from our cloud. No external hosting is involved in a share.
Privacy
No PII is collected, and there is no concept of a user — no account, no sign-in, no profile. Peers exchange only a randomly assigned session icon and a device identifier that is regenerated every app launch — nothing that persists to track a device from one gathering to the next. What’s reported when a device comes online is only that content was shared and listened to — anonymous counts, never who or where.
Security
All device-to-device traffic is TLS-encrypted (HTTPS), so nothing is readable off the air. Each device generates a fresh key and certificate each session — rotated on every app launch, and deliberately anonymous, with no name or personal detail inside. Content is stored in the app’s private, OS-sandboxed storage.
Online Dependencies
Sharing — none, ever. Scripture moves phone to phone fully offline.
Content — arrives from any nearby phone offline, or from ethnē online.
The app — on Android, it passes person to person by Bluetooth and installs, no internet. On iOS, the App Store is needed once.
Content — arrives from any nearby phone offline, or from ethnē online.
The app — on Android, it passes person to person by Bluetooth and installs, no internet. On iOS, the App Store is needed once.
Content / Data Storage
Scripture text, audio, and video live entirely on-device: structured content in an embedded SQLite graph database, media as files in app-private storage. What a device receives it keeps whole and can immediately re-share — every receiver becomes the next source.
Updates / Distribution
Content — flows from ethnē online when a connection exists and phone to phone when it doesn’t. Because devices receive complete content, updated content propagates down the same sharing chains that carried it first.
The app — on Android, app updates are shared the same way as content. On iOS, updates come through the App Store.
The app — on Android, app updates are shared the same way as content. On iOS, updates come through the App Store.
Security & custom apps
Private by default — and more for the hardest places.
For ministries working where the internet environment is hostile and privacy and security concerns are a matter of life and death, we recommend a custom app built on the ethnē platform, one that does not have a server and can be used on smartphones that do not have a SIM or connect to the internet. Our custom apps take this offline core further, built around each network’s own security needs and ministry philosophy.
