This week the Session team worked on a number of bug fixes related to an earlier ID blinding release and finished up Emoji reacts which should be rolling out very shortly. The core team continues work on a logging refactor which should make adding new logs easier and clean out non relevant logging messages. The Lokinet team has a successful build on MacOS and are discussing several approaches to Windows DNS with several working options now available.

Dev

Oxen Core

• Continue working through Windows build issues to test Hardware wallet issues 

Session

Session Android

• Add Android accessibility tags

• Fix crash occurring when quotes are retrieved

• Properly recognise hidden admins and moderators in open groups

• Fix message sending properly attributuing server IDs in open groups

• Add file IDs to open group message send endpoint

• Fix open group polling from sequence numbers instead of last hash

• Finish work on Emoji reacts

Session Desktop

• Settings screen redesign

• Properly recognise hidden admins and moderators in open groups

• Continue work on menu redesigns

• Finish work on Emoji reacts

• Drop DB column friendRequestStatus if exists

Session iOS

• Fix notification sound issue

• Change message request block and decline behaviour

• Fix issue which caused DB migration to fail

• Properly recognise hidden admins and moderators in open groups

• Fix issue with unread message counts

• Fix issue with message sequence numbers

• Only use YYImage for Gif/WebP images

• Fix issue with disappearing messages for senders

• Finish work on Emoji reacts

Session Open Group Server

• Fix wrong reference in upgraded sqlite files table

Lokinet

• Add more info to RC to help with future efforts to tackle network instability

Marketing

Hello everyone and welcome to another week of marketing updates from yours truly. 

This week Cam and Wes have been working on our A/B testing approach for advertising campaigns — these tests will be essential to make sure we get the best bang-for-buck from our advertising spend long-term. 

Alex continued the charge on the comms for the upcoming release(s) which will be covering emoji reacts, ID blinding, and performance upgrades. I heard through the grapevine there are fixes coming for Session Desktop notifications as well, for those of you who have been waiting — the day is coming. 

Alex and Tom combined for yet another video, this time about physical vs digital privacy — you can check it out here or read Alex’s article on the same topic. Wes also got a brand new article published this week, about the state of the surveillance state. It’s an absolute humdinger, and a must-read if you ask me — you can give it a gander over here. 

Wes and Alex have been using some new tools to help audit their H1s, H2s, and overall SEO for the blog — which should help take the website’s SEO performance from awesome to awesome-er. 💫

Alex teamed up with Sam to write the second edition of the brand new-newsletter from our parent organisation, the OPTF. Framed by OPTF is a newsletter covering all the things we hold near and dear at Oxen — and this week we’re covering the Twilio/Signal hack. You can check it out here, and make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future editions! 

The OPTF has also received some incredible submissions from its second call for essays and articles on digital rights. Sam is working with some of those writers now and you should start to see those articles appear on the OPTF website in the coming months. Initiatives like this are really important for not only creating educational and informative pieces about the most important issues the OPTF is working on, but also helping grow the OPTF’s brand (and subsequently Oxen, Session, and Lokinet’s as well).

The team has also continued its transition to a new database, workspace, and workflow in Notion. Notion has been a pillar of the marketing team for a while now, and levelling up our Notion skills is going a long way to improving efficiency, collaboration, and cohesiveness across the entire team. 

Connor, Alex, and I have also been hard at work with the devs trying to nail down the settings re-design for Session. Those changes are still a while away from hitting your devices, but we think you’ll love them. 

Oh, and we recorded a new podcast 👀