What it is
PompoOS (Πομπός, the sender) is a messaging app — text and location, daily use — over a LoRa mesh built on Meshtastic. It is for people with a phone and no affordable data connection. Started 9 September 2026; web at pompoos.com.
What it is not
Not an emergency system. The owner set this on day one: an app people install only for the day of a disaster will not be on their phone that day. The market is everyday messaging for roughly a billion people without data — Africa at thousands of nodes per country — and emergencies are one use case among many. If the project drifts toward civil-protection or "tactical" framing, it has lost its way.
The numbers (Kenya model)
- 6,928 nodes cover the country for €173–277 k — less than one 4G tower (€150–250 k).
- Capacity: 421 million messages per day, or 42 per person for 10 million users.
Decisions closed
- Free. No token, no DMS. Not ideology: it removes proof-of-relay — the mechanism that sank a well-known incentivised network — and saves ~130 bytes per packet on a link where bytes are everything.
- Meshtastic as the base: open LoRa mesh firmware and protocol, existing hardware.
- Routing, not flooding. With flooding the entire network moves about 0.7 messages per second whether it has one node or 7,000; with routing each cell adds capacity. The measured difference: 6,928×. Meshtastic does not have this solved, and it is the project's one genuinely open problem.
Relationship to the ecosystem
PompoOS is the ecosystem's only product designed to have no chain dependency. It shares hardware concepts with OmilooS's mesh and could use pallet-device-registry for optional attestation, but nothing in the daily path touches EmpoorioChain — by design, because a chain call needs the connectivity PompoOS exists to replace.
Status
Design and early code. No store listing. The routing problem is the work; everything else is engineering that exists elsewhere.
The page this replaces
Described a decentralised messaging product onboarding users on another chain. PompoOS onboards users who cannot reach any chain, which is a harder and more useful problem.
Based on the PompoOS project notes, 2026-09-09.