Releases - ui

Stable cwtch-alpha-0.3.0 3a744197b8

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.3.0

dan 2 months ago 39 commits to master since this release

We are pleased to release Cwtch alpha 0.3.0! This release line is the first where the Android experience is now expected to work reliably. This is the culmination of a lot of work over the past 5 months. The lastest updates that now should make Android work reliably are:

Android back button changes: now back button in the app moves the UI “back” through our stack view, and on the home, it no longer exits the app, but takes the user to their Android home screen
Fixing a bug that resulted in miscommunication between Client and Service resulting in new profiles getting created on new starts of the application
Improvements to the Client/Service IPC connection establishment code to make it more robust to terminations and restarts
Group Invite fix so that invites are now properly displayed in the UI
Editbox edit improvements
- new edit and update buttons for android
- resolution fixes to make edit boxes render correctly on larger low pixel density displays
Minor changes in Tapir to the p2p connection code causing this release to be backwards incompatible with previous releases. This is also why the minor version bump from 0.2 to 0.3

With a more usable Android experience this will allow more testing and likely the discovery of more bugs, which is great and expected! Please test and report any issues at https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/ui/issues

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

Downloads

Stable v0.2.0 8c51c10eb0

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.2.0

sarah 3 months ago 56 commits to master since this release

Major Changes

Tapir

Tapir is our new pre-release library that defines a lightweight communication layer that can be used by Cwtch and other metadata resistant applications. Cwtch has been, and will continue to be, inspired by Ricochet, and previous versions have been build on libricochet-go. As Cwtch has developed we have increasingly made modifications to the ricochet protocol to improve security and performance. While planning our roadmap for the next year it became obvious that to achieve many of our goals, we would be better served by redefining this layer entirely, moving away from ricochet’s channel architecture, and instead focusing on defining a mechanism for applications to securely build upon anonymous communication networks. We will dive further into Tapir in the upcoming weeks.

Android with QAndroidService

For the entire 0.1 release cycle we’ve been working hard to get Cwtch onto Android. We have been releasing builds, which alone is a big first step, but they’ve been unusably unstable. A large part of the work has been in a large redesign and refactor of the Cwtch library which was not built with mobile in mind. For mobile you need to have persistent logic (networking for example) in a stand along service that can keep running, and your UI in a sleepable or killable and restartable app. Our initial prototype Cwtch library was not built with this architecture in mind, so the last several 0.1.x releases have included refactors to move towards a more stable Android experience. One of the last steps has been moving the new refactored service code into an Android/QT QAndroidService. The overall Android experience isn’t quite where we want it yet and will continue to be a big focus of the 0.2 release cycle.

Additional Changes

Contact Retry: A new Cwtch app plugin system and a new contact retry system (a system that occasionally tries to reconnect to people who were initially offline)
Blocking: We have surfaced blocking and unblocking particular peers in the Cwtch UI
Delete: The storage engine now supports removal of deleted contacts
Fixed crash on launch in Windows: We identified and fixed a bug which caused windows to be unable to find the tor binary resulting in a crash for some Windows users. It currently still does leave open a command console window which is the Tor process running. We are working to get that hidden for future releases.
Windows log files: The Windows build of Cwtch now logs to a file (‘cwtch_log.txt’) by default when run instead of the console, which is a much more user friendly way for Windows users to get access to the logs. It also now comes bundled with a ‘debug.bat’ which launches the app in debug mode, writing extra (potentially sensitive, but useful) information to the logfile.
Infinite queue: We found a problem in our eventbus where some components of Cwtch could flood it causing some messages to other components to be lost. This was observed by some users noticing new messages when restarting the app for the second or third time from groups. This is now fixed.
Tor / libricochet-go bottleneck: We fixed a bottleneck in Tor outbound connection code which previously significantly delayed peer connection establishment.

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

Downloads

Stable cwtch-alpha-0.1.5 eca82ae45d

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.1.5

dan 4 months ago 104 commits to master since this release

We’ve been mostly heads down on two large projects: ‘make cwtch work on android’ and ‘tapir: a new implementation of the ricochet protocol’.

This release contains a lot of the work towards ‘make cwtch work on android’ except that part where it does (More time with a debugger needed). To that end, since the last release (0.1.4), this release contains a very refactored cwtch library/app/engine. In order to put all the connection, networking, and file storage parts of cwtch into an Android service we had to take all those parts, make them much less coupled with the other parts of Cwtch, and then add in new ways to instantiate Cwtch apps in two parts (client and service) and create an IPC system for them to use to communicate. All that work is in this release available for testing and we want to get it into peoples hands to do just that.

Running the app on desktop by default will run in the traditional way as a single app (while still using our refactored code, just in a unified app), however, if you want to test the new client/service setup for any reason (for me, it was faster than loading it onto a phone each time) you can run two cwtch processes from the command like as follows

$ cwtch --service

$ cwtch --clientui

And they should work together, and you can even kill the client and restart it and it should be fine.

So that is the biggest and largest set of changes in this new release, but over the course of work on this a lot of small improvements crept in as well including:

A progress spinner in the UI for groups indicating when they are connected but syncing with the server
Chat text bar is locked until you can actually send (so a peer to peer connection is established, or a group is synced)
Minor updates to the UI and what is clickable
Minor improvements in “performance” in that we removed a few threads that poll for events and replaced them with events and event handlers
Possibly minor improvements to status display

So while there aren’t a lot of new user improvements, a lot of code has changed or been moved around and we definitely wanted to get it out and into people’s hands for testing.

Thanks!

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

Downloads

Pre-Release cwtch-alpha-0.1.4 fa8d2007ec

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.1.4

dan 7 months ago 129 commits to master since this release

contains the following work and more:

Lots of UI scaling fixes that should make it more consistent and better across many displays, especially mobile
Beginnings of Android notifications
Big speedups to group loading (most noticeable on Android)
Version and build date in settings
Splash screen loads sooner now

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

Downloads

Pre-Release cwtch-alpha-0.1.3 90c9405b7e

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.1.3

dan 8 months ago 158 commits to master since this release

contains the following work and more:

Translations support!
Portuguese, German and French translations
Android save user name fix
Splash screen where needed (mostly android)
Group membership pane
many more little fixes

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

Downloads

Pre-Release cwtch-alpha-0.1.2 7b350d4c54

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.1.2

dan 9 months ago 209 commits to master since this release

contains the following work and more:

Many Tor related fixes so that it more easily is autorun by Cwtch out of the box on Linux
Inclusion of Tor in Windows builds
Visual feedback on sending messages to groups
Many small visual clean ups
Fixing the edit boxes on Android and Windows to receive group invites
Big stability fixes for how we run and use Tor (stop using NEWNYM to trouble shoot old 0.3.4.x connections)
Better saving and handling of group/peer names and displaying of them

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

Downloads

Pre-Release cwtch-alpha-0.1.1 0fc8fc342b

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.1.1

erinn 9 months ago 236 commits to master since this release

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon

Downloads

Pre-Release cwtch-alpha-0.1 7b776bde57

Cwtch Alpha Release 0.1

sarah 9 months ago 278 commits to master since this release

THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE - EXPECT BUGS.

We are providing these binaries in order to show off what Cwtch is capable of so far, but please expect bugs and note that we HAVE NOT subjected this code to a security audit or usability testing yet.

It is also not remotely feature complete. Some features are supported by the underlying Cwtch library (check out https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/cwtch) but not yet by the UI, and some are still having their research/design finalized by the Open Privacy team before being implemented. We have lots of cool features in the works and we hope you’ll check back later to try them out!

ANDROID: We are not putting Cwtch up on the Play Store yet. If your phone has developer mode enabled, you can sideload the APK below. If you don’t already know how to do this, please wait until we put it on the Store at a future date.

Please note that the Cwtch server feature can be very bandwidth-intensive right now, so please DO NOT CONNECT TO CWTCH SERVERS OVER CELLULAR DATA PLANS or an internet plan with a low data cap. The direct messaging feature, however, uses negligible bandwidth (unless you decide to send gigabytes of text with it). It also has difficulty maintaining its Tor onion service right now, so you may need to kill and restart the app if you find it unable to receive new incoming connections (outgoing connections should work fine).

Credits: Profile and Server Icons in this alpha were designed by freepik from Flaticon