Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat Tops French App Store After Orange Outage

The ranking surge is less a verdict on Bitchat's merits than a demand signal: when carrier networks fail, users reach for infrastructure that doesn't depend on them, and a Bluetooth mesh fits that gap. The timing, days after large cost-of-living protests, suggests the outage amplified an existing appetite for channels outside operator control. Whether downloads convert into sustained usage after Orange restores service is the open question, and whether French regulators or carriers treat peer-to-peer messaging as a resilience tool or a blind spot is worth watching.