Project Lantern
Offline survival guide · on your phone · no account
Earthquake, flood, a long blackout, infrastructure collapse — a guide that opens when your phone has no signal. Lessons, maps and libraries live on the device. No account, no server, nothing collected.
Power and signal are the first two things a crisis takes away. A guide that has to connect before it opens is the one that fails exactly when it is needed.
231 lessons and 1,839 sections ship with the app — 1.6 MB in total. It installs in airplane mode and runs in airplane mode.
Translation happens on the phone too: the texts can be read in 19 languages and no sentence leaves the device. Nothing is collected — that is not a policy clause, the app has no route to the network.
Sources contradict each other. The contradictions are not hidden: the lesson says which source claims what, and a separate file is kept for clinician review.
Fever, cough, burns, snakebite — what to do at home and where it ends. 36 conditions, 38 remedies; each one states what it is for, how to do it and what evidence it rests on, with a separate caution block.
This is not medical advice. What it is worth is precisely that boundary: how far you go yourself, and from where on you need a doctor.
The whole world is 138 GB. It does not fit on a phone and it does not need to: a person wants the map of where they are.
242 countries, 180 administrative regions, 2,063 cities. Every row states how much space it will take, and those numbers were measured, not estimated — Turkey 95 MB, Istanbul 29 MB.
A downloaded map opens with no internet: roads, settlements, streets. Map data comes from OpenStreetMap contributors and is licensed ODbL.
Lessons are written and reviewed texts. The libraries are the whole of the sources those lessons rest on — one teaches, the other opens up.
21 packs, 4.1 GB in total: medicine, water, food, farming, repair, radio, the outdoors. Download what you want; what you skip takes no space.
There is full-text search inside each pack. You do not need to know the page's name — you type a word that appears inside it.
New
In development
The desktop app writes a browser-based copy of itself onto a USB stick — same interface, same lessons. Press “download” and the maps and libraries go onto the same stick. That USB then opens on any computer you plug it into, with no installation and no internet.
Why five? Because five is what “give one to your neighbour, your brother, the village head” means. Unlimited distribution would be a responsibility we could not stand behind; five is enough to keep a neighbourhood going. The feature is not written yet — this section describes what we intend to build, not something you can buy today.
Why it exists
This app was written so that people can stay alive if society itself breaks down one day.
Every design decision ties back to that question: why offline, why no account, why maps come down region by region, why contradicting sources in first aid are not hidden.