Lifeline Protocol
An offline emergency coordination app built around the people you care about. Lifeline brings plans, supplies, responsibilities, and essential information together on your phone, with a working Android foundation that has been tested in airplane mode.
The question
What happens to your family’s emergency plan when the internet disappears?
The people still matter. The supplies still matter. Someone still needs to know who is doing what, where to go, and what’s available. But information scattered across messages, websites, and somebody’s memory becomes a hell of a lot harder to use.
Lifeline started as one of those ideas I couldn’t leave alone. I wanted families, communities, and eventually teams working in disconnected environments to have something useful in their hands when the systems they normally depend on become unavailable.
The approach
I worked through the problem from several directions: preparedness writing, pitch materials, business planning, early prototypes, and the architecture needed to make the idea practical. The Suburban Winter Storm Protocol helped ground that work in situations a family might actually face.
The current Android app brings that thinking into a local workspace for people, protocols, tasks, contacts, locations, and inventory. Supplies can be committed to groups without allocating the same resources twice. The workspace includes encryption, automatic locking, and protected backups.
Development has involved testing on actual phones, including airplane-mode use and restoring an encrypted backup after uninstalling and reinstalling the app. Nearby Bluetooth communication is another part of the work, with discovery and diagnostic exchanges already tested between two devices.
Where it stands
Lifeline has grown into a working Android app with tested offline planning, inventory, fingerprint access, and backup recovery.
Authenticated group sharing is still under development. Its newer permissions and encrypted transfer work need full testing across multiple phones, while membership removal, key rotation, and online catch-up remain unfinished.
There’s substantial working software here, and there’s still important work before I’d call it ready for people to depend on during an emergency.
What stays with me
One of the most meaningful milestones was restoring the workspace after reinstalling the app, without an internet connection. That made the idea feel tangible in a different way.
I keep coming back to the person holding the phone. They may be worried, tired, responsible for others, and trying to make a decision with incomplete information. That person deserves something built with care. They’re the reason I keep working on this.