This week the Session team is closing in on a release containing both menu & onboarding changes, and theming for mobile devices. PR’s are also in for some highly requested quality of life features like Session desktop audio notifications and iPad landscape mode support. The core team is fixing an issue which is affecting some Service Nodes, resulting in their tracking of batching payouts to be inaccurate. The Lokinet team is conducting some internal testing of the upcoming releases and making changes based on the feedback from that. 

Dev

Oxen Core

• Investigate and propose fixes for an issue with Service Node batching lists

• Fix OxenMQ race condition

Session

Session Android

• Support for Huawei push notifications

• Add profile data to message request response message

• Show message sender in group push notifications

Session iOS

• iPad landscape UI

• Merge 2.2.0, which adds a number of bugfixes and features mentioned over the past few weeks of dev updates

Session Desktop

• Audio notifications

• Handle deleted messages and reacts at the same time

• Fix displayName to use an allowed length based on bytes rather than characters

• Add options to accept, decline or block in message requests

• Ongoing work on theming

• Change UI for link previews when preview image is less than 200px

• Add toast on rate limit being hit for message reactions

• Fix selected message UI issue

• Fix copy in various dialogues

• Fix rerender loop of react list modal

• Fix link preview rendering when no preview is found

• Fix login screen strings

Session push notification server

• Add support  for Huawei push notifications 

Lokinet

• We conducted an Lokinet test in the office with some of the non technical team members to gather feedback on UX/UI design. Overall things went well, but some feedback on Mac installation steps was given which we will be implementing.

• Remove hardcoded path in Lokinet GUI

• Regenerate Lokinet icons as SVGs

Marketing

Howdy y’all,

This week we continued to react to the sudden surge in Iranian Session users, with the production of new on-boarding docs which display visual guides that reflect the upcoming UI changes. We are also in talks with an organisation called Localisation Lab, who specialise in translation and ensuring that free and open source software is globally accessible. This partnership will be key to our growth in Iran, as well as many other places in the world where civil unrest and censorship will inevitably drive similar growth in Session users in the future.

On the content marketing front, we have edited episode two of The Session Tapes into short-form video content which can be pushed out to new audiences through TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. This is demonstrative of a broader strategy which will ensure that the long-form videos we produce can be converted for short-form platforms, which will significantly increase the ultimate return that the project gets back from our investment in video content production.

Proactive customer support preparation continued for Lokinet, with many new articles added to our support centre in Zendesk. The new GUI is under-going the final stages of internal testing at the moment, and its release will be a quantum leap forward for the sleeping giant of the Oxen product stack. If you follow Lokinet on Twitter, you will have already seen this sneak peak:

The World Economic Data Forum is fast approaching and we have now finalised our preparation for our role in it. Don’t forget to register here so that you can catch our talks and panel discussions, as well as all the other great discussions which will be generated by this event. That's it for us this week — thanks for stoppin’ by 🤠