Dev

This week the Session team pushed forward with disappearing messages and closed groups, disappearing messages has now been moved into code review on Android and a second stage of QA on iOS. Some teams are also finishing up work on the first chunk of closed groups, and are starting to write unit tests to ensure closed group bugs are caught. The Oxen core team is making good progress on the EVM <> Oxen workchain communications layer, test nodes can now jointly sign on a message and collate those signatures for verification. The Lokinet team is working on modifying different internal message types to work properly with libQUIC but is nearing the stage of upgrading testnet to get nodes to start speaking to each other using liqQUIC which is very exciting

Session

Session Android

• Fix a number of button styles

• Update libsodium to potentially catch elusive crashes: 1, 2, 3 

• Attempt to fix object out of bounds in media preview adapter cursor adapter

• Ignore new fields in push notifications

• Ongoing work on onboarding overhaul

• Start code review on PR to overhaul disappearing messages

• Ongoing work on closed group overhaul

Session Desktop

• Prevent Session desktop installation on older versions of Windows

• Add setting to swap functionality of enter and shift+enter to break line or send message

• Ongoing work on closed group overhaul

• Ongoing work on disappearing messages overhaul

Session iOS 

• Ongoing work on closed group overhaul

• Add back missing strings

• Add new disappearing messages strings

• Updated latest translations from Crowdin

• Fix issue where conversation screen is dismissed incorrectly

Start working through XCode 15 build issues 

• Reworked the EmojiGenerator to structure the 'EmojiWithSkinTones+String" file as the original structure was causing XCode 15 to build forever

• Reworked the seed node certificate loading in an effort to fix a crash

• Updated to the latest version of webp

• Commented out a line causing build issues

• Fixed a number of build warnings

• Fixed an issue when migrating from a pre 2.3.0 version to the latest version

• Fixed the SessionThread 'isPinned' property

• Removed the deprecated 'isPinned' value from the code (db column will remain but reference is gone, seems to work without issues)

• Made a minor theme change to the conversation list

libSession-util

• Ongoing work on handling protobufs

• More work on onion request helpers

• Add signing and verification to encrypt_message/decrypt_message

Session push notification Service 

• Disable including timestamp in push notification for Session Android

• Add ZMQ PUSH/PULL sockets to process notifications

• Add timestamp and expiry to notification metadata

Oxen Core  

• More work bridging EVM smart contract actions into the Service Node network

Lokinet

• Ongoing lokinet-to-lokinet message refactoring

libQUIC

• Added request/response stream interface using bencoded data

• Added callbacks for connection closed and connection established

• Misc improvements/small fixes: 1, 2, 3, 4

Marketing

Hey folks, welcome back to the land of marketing. Last week our focus was primarily on improving our video content strategy and charging through content production. 

Cam and Wes spent a lot of last week looking to improve and refocus our video content strategy (YouTube) going into Q4. Much like the broader branding refresh which is currently underway, our media content strategy is shifting to better grow and leverage our channel. We are stoked with the foundation that our channel has created for our future content and want to focus now on growing our audience.  We took the time last week to focus on creating strong and clear content strategy guides for our current Oxen channel, which included looking at ways to increase our watchtime retention, content planning improvements, channel discoverability and viewership funnel. 

Speaking of media content, we finished the main edit and prepared socials for a new video we are planning to drop over the next week or so. This video will fall in line with the new strategy and should make for a very fun watch (keep an eye out on our socials for this one). 

We also spent time experimenting with copy formats to improve our discoverability on Mastodon. Having completed much of our strategy outline for the platform in Q4, we’re using the remaining week in the quarter to refine our copy and band presence so that we can really hit the ground running come October. 

Session Token wise, Josh and Cam continued to work on our core messaging, and workshopped unique selling point statements for the rebrand. This is an ongoing process, but it is making strong development. 

Thanks for checking in folks, catch you next week.