I belong to a community emergency response team. The idea is to use relatively untrained “spotters” to quickly build a picture of the damage during a catastrophic event. I have an Android app to build a damage assessment report on a cell phone. It works fine if a wifi connection or a cellular network is available, delivering json packets to an mqtt server. But we can assume that those connections may very well go down in a real catastrophe. I’d like to explore using meshtastic as an alternative transport, where the cell phone talks to a meshtastic node via bluetooth and the meshtastic network delivers the mqtt transaction to local or global servers. It seems to me that most of the pieces are already working, but I do not understand how I can graft this new transport to an existing Android app. Could anybody enlighten me?
As far as I understand Meshtastic, its creators wish to build small mesh networks that transport short mesages to all.
What you are searching for and what I am searching for is a physical transport layer for LoRa. For that we would need an API. For my idea of using LoRa as a transport layer for FIDOnet technology something like the Hays modem control langiage would be an easy solution.
I think you want to start here Meshtastic port numbers | Meshtastic
There is a TCP transport, obviously would be pretty slow. I am not clear on which pieces (either existing or theoretical) you are trying to graft on to your android app specifically.
Look into what people did for ATAK and how they harnessed the platform for that.
The ATAK forwarder way is not the recommended integration solution as it is pretty high maintenance and fragile, there is a lot of the android app code duplicated into the ATAK forwarder and for most 3rd party apps having apps signed by the government is not a required step.
Oh I didn’t realize that was you replying. You know much more about it than me 
- the same. EMR team in Serbia
Isn’t this something that could be achieved with a LoraWAN like architecture? I don’t think I’m capturing the idea here. Would you like someone to explain how this would work or are you asking for specific work to be done on a certain component?
There are better options for integration that what the atak forwarder does.