Dev

Happy to celebrate the 250th Oxen labs update! On this day 5 years ago we did our first dev update and I’m stoked that we’re keeping the institution going, here's to another 5 years of dev updates! For a special look back at the last 5 years, check out the video above where I read through some old dev updates and reminisce. 

This week the Session team published a prerelease on Android which is currently being tested. This prerelease fixes a number of the most frequent crashes and ANR (App Not Responding) issues on Android. The larger Session team continued their work on user config which is inching closer to release, just picking up the final cross platform issues in testing before we move to an internal test. The core team broke off to work on some Libsession tasks but also completed additional work on the Oxen storage server, as well as continuing to engage with the Ledger auditors. The Lokinet team made huge progress with internal testing of libquic, which is saturating a 60MBps connection in local environments and achieving about 15MBps when running connecting via libquic remotely over the internet. As a first test this is great, but we are hoping to squeeze even more performance out of libquic with some further analysis of bottlenecks and bugs this week.

Oxen Core

• Add new deletion options to Oxen storage server

• Ongoing conversations with auditors at Ledger 

Session

Session Android

• Publish prerelease which contains a number of features, including fixes for the most common crashes and ANR’s on Android and many small visual changes to improve theming

• Hide scroll to bottom button when less than 50dp away from the bottom of the screen

• Fix incorrect Session ID truncation where required

• Build and integrate new dialog display

• Fix dialog theming issues

• Fix back button background in light themes

• Fix long messages not being visible when reacting

• Ongoing work on user config overhaul, fixing a number of user config edge cases which were found during cross platform testing 

Session iOS

• Ongoing work on user config overhaul, fixing a number of user config edge cases which were found during cross platform testing

• Ongoing work to integrate disappearing messages with new user config design

Session Desktop

• Resolve a number of issues which came up when reviewing quote improvement PR

• Ongoing work to integrate disappearing messages with new user config design 

Lokinet

• WIP: Ensure thread safety

• Test client server argument passing, misc cleanups

• Test suite cleanup

• Add chunked sending interface

• Expose callback for opening streams

• Refactor stream creation

Marketing

GM Last week in the Oxen labs the marketing team continued work on planning our brand refresh marketing campaign and OPTF grant applications. We also undertook some data analysis as a part of our regular process optimisation for social media.

The marketing tactics which comprise the awareness and conversion stages of our funnel are now largely planned and ready to be deployed when the campaign launches, with the remainder of the work relating to the retention tactics. 

OPTF grant applications continue, with several organisations identified as potential donors. We like our chances of having the applications accepted, and even got to sit down with a VIP from one of these organisations while Alex and Sam were at DRAPAC 2023 in Chiang Mai 2 weeks ago which opened more doors for us. These grants will be a serious boon for the project.

We always want to know that whatever we’re doing is as effective as possible. When it comes to social media and other content production, that means a serious content auditing process. Last week we undertook this process and analysed all the available data in order to glean insights that allow us to re-iteratively improve our strategy going forward.

Seeya next time!