Ok but is it accessible without root?
Discussion
Yeah, just researched that and doesn't look feasible, which is I guess why meshtastic relies on additional hw 🙄, and for bitchat ble makes sense.
Some microcontroller wifi bridges for bitchat would be cool, ie in a war zone where phones are not close enough for ble, and internet is limited. Especially with those chips being so cheap and resilient.
Airdrop is an example of kernel level wifi chip extensions that Apple does. Android/open source is locked out of that kind of innovation.
Once you go outside the client/access-point model, you are no longer "wifi". Some phones allow you to have wifi hotspot on at the same time as being connected to a wifi accesspoint, but this is only because it has two separate radios. BLE has a connectionless mode, and it has a mesh mode, built into the stack. They are in the BLE protocol. Wifi-mesh isn't something a phone can do unless it has a radio in accesspoint mode. With BLE, mesh doesent require a special radio.