The story, the answers, and how to reach us.
Campus safety tools usually assume you have signal. Hops doesn't — it's built so that an emergency flare, a friend request, or a check-in still works when Wi-Fi is down, cell coverage is spotty, or you're somewhere a network never reached in the first place.
Every core feature runs peer-to-peer over Bluetooth: your phone and a nearby phone talk directly, with no server in between reading, storing, or relaying the content. The only thing Hops' backend handles is your account — signing in, recovering a password, and identity for the campus admin team. Everything else — chat, presence, alerts, games, the works — lives entirely on-device and over the air.
Hops is built for one campus at a time: the app's admin tools (moderation, official alerts, account management) are run by your own campus's team, not by us centrally.
Only once, to create your account. After that, Radar, chat, Emergency Flare, Watch Me, Community Alerts, Lost & Found, Task Tracker and both mini-games all work over Bluetooth alone, with no signal and no data.
The things that do need a connection are signing up, signing in on a new device, and password recovery — those talk to the account system. Everything else is device-to-device.
No. Hops never records or transmits GPS location. Android requires the Location permission to allow Bluetooth scanning at all — that's an OS requirement, not something Hops uses to know where you are.
1:1 chats travel directly between your two phones over Bluetooth and are never sent to or stored on a server — there is no copy of your conversation anywhere but the two devices. Community Alerts is the deliberate exception: it’s a public broadcast to everyone nearby.
To be straight with you about the limits: we don’t describe Hops as an end-to-end-encrypted messenger, because it isn’t one. A direct chat runs over a point-to-point Bluetooth connection, and the short-range fallback used when that connection isn’t available is scrambled but is not built to withstand a determined attacker. If you need guaranteed-private messaging, use a dedicated secure messenger — Hops is built for reach when there’s no signal, not for secrecy.
An alert that broadcasts to every Hops user in Bluetooth range — and relays through their phones, so it reaches further than your own phone could. You set it off from your phone’s quick-settings panel or by holding the app icon, so you don’t have to unlock and navigate the app first. It asks you to confirm and pick a reason before it sends, so it can’t fire by accident in your pocket.
Flares are digitally signed, so a receiving phone can check the alert really came from the account it claims — and it can check that with no internet connection. Campus admins can also send a signed Official Alert to everyone at once.
Carrots are earned by playing Hops Hopper and Hops Wordle inside the app, and spent in the in-app Hops Shop on cosmetics — colour themes, avatar frames, chat bubble skins, radar icons, profile banners and the like. Nothing in the shop affects gameplay or any safety feature. Supporting Hops here on the website funds development directly — it's a separate thing from in-app carrots, not a way to buy them. See the Support Hops page for details.
Hops is deployed and moderated by your own campus's admin team, who control account management and official alerts for your campus specifically.
Android phones — that’s where the full app runs, and it needs Android 7.0 or newer. There is a Windows desktop build for development, but the Bluetooth features don’t work there, so it isn’t useful as a safety app. iOS isn’t available yet. See the Download page for the details.
Question, bug report, or something else? Send us a note — this opens your email app with the message pre-filled, nothing is stored here.
Prefer email directly? Reach us at contact@hopsapp.example