Iranians build their own air-raid app while the state leaves them in the dark
The bombs fall first, then the lights go out. For weeks Iran’s grid has staggered under Israeli strikes that melt transformers into scrap, yet the regime still refuses to give 83 million citizens a single official channel that says where or when the next warhead lands. So they wrote one themselves.
Mahsa Alert, a scrappy offline map that lives inside Telegram and Android sideloads, is now the closest thing Tehran has to an early-warning system. No sirens, no presidential text, no civil-defence app—just a swarm of strangers pinging GPS pins whenever they hear the whistle of an incoming jet.
A patchwork radar built in exile
The code was stitched together by Iranian diaspora coders in Berlin, Toronto and Los Angeles, many of them students who fled after the 2022 protests over Mahsa Amini’s death in morality-police custody. They named the tool in her honour, then pushed it back across the border by WhatsApp and memory stick, the same smuggling route once used for protest videos. Within 48 hours of the first upload, 200 000 devices inside Iran carried a copy; today the maintainers claim 1.4 million active nodes, though they admit they can only count the phones that briefly ping their anonymised server before the next blackout.
The app’s skeleton is open-source OSM tiles, fattened with three data veins: satellite imagery scraped before clouds of smoke obscured the lenses; Telegram groups where civilians post geotagged explosion photos; and a nightly Git dump of ship-tracking AIS points that, paradoxically, lets users guess which Gulf-based carrier might launch the next wave of F-35 sorties. When the government throttles the internet to near-zero, the package still opens: a 120-megabyte offline bundle pre-loaded with shelter locations, police checkpoints and the estimated blast radius of a 2 000-pound JDAM.
Starlink beams in where tehran cuts the cord
Rouhani-era fibre is now dark fibre. Since October the Ministry of ICT has pulled the kill switch at least 18 times, usually minutes after rockets leave Israeli cockpits. The workaround is Elon Musk’s constellation: Starlink dishes the size of pizza boxes, spirited in via Kurdish Iraq and sold in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar for the price of a used Peugeot. Users align them on rooftops under potato-sack camouflage, then hotspot Mahsa Alert to the whole apartment block. Speeds hover at 40 Mbps—enough to upload a crash site photo before the smoke clears.
But electricity remains the choke point. Rolling 12-hour blackouts, imposed both by fuel shortage and by military decree, drain power banks faster than they recharge. One developer told me he is coding a low-bitmap mode that renders shelters as 8-bit squares, shaving battery drain by 60 %. “We are optimising for a war of attrition against lithium ions,” he said, only half joking.
The map that also watches the watchers
Bomb alerts are only half the utility. The same crowdsourced pins mark Basij roadblocks, morality-police vans and, in recent builds, the shifting location of Russian-supplied Tor-M2 air-defence launchers parked near schools. A green icon means “checkpoint reported in last hour”; red means “live gunfire”. The result is a living indictment of a state that surveils its people yet refuses to protect them.
Israeli citizens get Home Front Command push alerts in under five seconds; Iranians get a volunteer’s screenshot that might arrive after the shrapnel. Still, the asymmetry is shrinking. During the 1 April strike on Isfahan, users uploaded 47 separate shelter coordinates within six minutes, helping an estimated 3 000 late-shift workers reach basement cover before the second wave hit a military hangar. No official tally counts lives saved, but the Git commit log shows a spike of “thank-you” voice notes that same night—audio files that self-destruct after playback to evade IRGC forensics.
The regime has noticed. Last week prosecutors in Shirandabe indicted a 19-year-old CS student for “propaganda against the state” after his Telegram handle appeared in a Mahsa Alert credit line. The charge sheet cites “collaboration with hostile satellite networks”. Translation: he compressed the offline map into a 90-MB zip small enough to share by Bluetooth. If convicted, he faces ten years.
Yet every shutdown spawns a fork. Code is copy-paste resistance; you cannot jail a Git repository. While the republic’s ageing air-defence radars spin aimlessly, a generation that grew up on circumvention tools now treats survival itself as an open-source project. They will keep compiling, keep sideloading, keep mapping the next crater before the dust settles. The state can turn the lights off, but it cannot turn off the network that lives in their pockets—and in their heads.