// the find
markqvist/Sideband
LXMF client for Android, Linux and macOS allowing you to communicate with people or LXMF-compatible systems over Reticulum networks using LoRa, Packet Radio, WiFi, I2P, or anything else Reticulum supports.
Sideband is a messaging and telemetry client built on the Reticulum networking stack, letting you send encrypted messages over LoRa, packet radio, I2P, or plain TCP/IP — no servers, no accounts, no internet required. It runs on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows, and doubles as a remote control and situational awareness platform. The target audience is ham radio operators, off-grid communities, and privacy-minded people who want communication infrastructure they actually own.
The transport-agnostic design is the real value here — the same app message works over LoRa at 1200 baud or over a fast WiFi link, because Reticulum abstracts that cleanly. Audio messages over LoRa via Codec2 is genuinely impressive: squeezing intelligible voice through a 1200bps radio channel is a hard problem and they've solved it. The plugin system is properly extensible — telemetry, command execution, and service hooks are all first-class with clean Python examples, not bolted on. The Android build deliberately avoids Google APIs entirely, including Play Services, which is a real technical commitment that most cross-platform apps don't bother with.
This is a public mirror — all actual development happens elsewhere, which means the issue tracker and PR workflow here are dead ends. That's a meaningful friction point for anyone wanting to contribute or track bugs. The UI is built on Kivy/KivyMD, which produces functional but noticeably non-native interfaces on every platform; on Android especially it feels like a ported desktop app. The Windows pip install explicitly warns you to use Python 3.12.7 specifically because 3.13 breaks Kivy — that's a fragile dependency situation that will keep biting people. Setup complexity is high: getting LoRa or packet radio working requires manually editing Reticulum config files, which have no GUI, and the docs for that live in a separate project.