On April 23, 2026, the MeshCore development team published a detailed account of an internal dispute that has been unfolding over the past several months — and announced where the project officially goes from here.
*Source: MeshCore Blog – "Why The Split?", April 23, 2026*
What Happened?
The conflict centres on Andy Kirby, a former team member who had been quietly rebuilding large portions of the MeshCore ecosystem — including standalone device firmware, the mobile app, and web-based tools — primarily using AI-generated code via Claude. The team says this was never disclosed. The situation escalated when they discovered that Kirby had filed a trademark application for the "MeshCore" name on March 29, 2026, without informing anyone on the team. All internal communication has since broken down entirely.
The "Official" Question
The core team is clear on one point: the authoritative source of what constitutes official MeshCore is the public GitHub repository — and Kirby has never contributed a single commit to it. He continues to operate meshcore.co.uk and markets his MeshOS product line there using the word "official," a claim the core team disputes directly.
New Official Channels
In response, the team has consolidated around meshcore.io as the new central hub for all official activity. A new Discord server has also been launched for direct interaction with developers:
The Team and Project Scale
The remaining core team includes Scott (project founder and lead firmware engineer behind the Ripple firmware), Liam Cottle (official app developer), Recrof (MeshCore Map and Flasher), FDLamotte (Python tooling and STM32 firmware), and Oltaco (OTA bootloader improvements). All members have committed to continuing development with human-written code going forward.
The project's scale puts the internal dispute in perspective: since launching in January 2025, MeshCore has grown to over 38,000 nodes on the global map and more than 100,000 active users across Android and iOS — a remarkable milestone for an open-source, off-grid mesh radio project built in just over a year.