Zello tops US app store as the walkie-talkie for hurricane volunteers

Zello tops US app store as the walkie-talkie for hurricane volunteers

With Hurricane Irma hitting Florida’s southern islands as a category four storm, and more than 6.3 million being told to evacuate Florida, being able to stay in contact with the outside world is a high priority. As a result, smartphone apps which can help coordinate rescues and responses have become crucial to efforts.

The main one that’s being talked about — and downloaded at a prodigious rate — is Zello, a walkie-talkie app which was originally launched in Russia in 2007 under the name LoudTalks (but since moved to Austin, Texas in 2011) and now boasts 100 million users around the world. After being featured in a Houston Chronicle story about the “Cajun Navy” of volunteers who have been using the app to coordinate their efforts in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the app hit the top of the US app store.

Zello appears to have added six million new registered users since Monday, the company’s CEO, Bill Moore, told BuzzFeed News, and is now the top free app on the iOS App Store. “With the crush of new users and emergency situations, most of the Zello team is working long days either maintaining capacity or helping with customer support,” he said.

However, the huge interest in Zello saw the company admitting it has had to add servers to keep it up.

Now, with Hurricane Irma bearing down on Florida, interest in Zello is being boosted yet again.

There’s absolutely no doubt that using a walkie-talkie app works extremely well in tough situations, and especially amongst volunteers who are quite simply too busy helping people to try typing on a smart phone. Especially when, let’s face it, their hands are wet and the weather is so bad.

However, for some reason social media is rife with incorrect assertions that the app will still work even without a cell signal, perhaps because it is being used in this disaster context.

To his credit, Founder and CEO/CTO Alexey Gavrilov has made it expressly clear on their blog that Zello “is not intended as a replacement for instructions from government emergency agencies or sanctioned rescue organizations. It is not a hurricane rescue tool and is only as useful as the people who use it, and as reliable as the data network available. If there is no WiFi and no cellular data service, communication apps (including Zello) won’t work.”