◤ Step 03 · Mobile App ◥
Built your node and flashed the firmware? The CicadaTAK app connects your phone to a node over WiFi — map, chat, push-to-talk voice, and team tracking, all over the mesh. No node? It also pairs straight to a standard Meshtastic radio over Bluetooth, or runs on your phone alone.
Live on the App Store. Install it on your iPhone, connect to your node's WiFi, and you're on the mesh.
App Store ↗Live on Google Play. Install it on your Android phone, connect to your node's WiFi, and you're on the mesh.
Google Play ↗Want a heads-up when it drops? Email info@cicadatak.com or follow @cicadaxbuilds.
The app does not require a CicadaTAK node. Pair it over Bluetooth with a standard Meshtastic LoRa board — a Heltec, RAK or T-Deck, around $30 — and you get the live team map, encrypted team chat, public chat, positions and shared waypoints. Photos, push-to-talk voice, node-hosted map downloads and network control are the parts that need a node.
With no radio at all it runs standalone: your own GPS on offline maps you loaded yourself, with markers, routes and measurements.
Outside the US, Canada, Mexico and Australia, this is how to run it. A CicadaTAK node runs either the US plan (also licence-exempt in Canada and Mexico) or the Australian one, and nothing else — the radio module is filtered to North American and Australian spectrum. A Meshtastic radio carries its own regional band plan, and the app uses whatever region the radio is set to; it never overrides it. Load your own map tiles too — the in-app aerial downloader covers the United States only. See the Field Guide.