Dev

On the Session side of things we’ve had a week of review! That meant lots of ongoing tasks moved from active development into either code review or QA. This included Android and Desktop disappearing messages going into QA, and Closed group chunk 1 on iOS and Desktop going into QA/Code review. For disappearing messages these are the final stages between internal team and power user testing, which means we're getting closer and closer to release! On the Oxen core team we finished off our Merkle tree implementation, which allows users to efficiently prove their balances on the Oxen workchain to the EVM chain. We are now working on Oxen core changes to allow balances to be accumulated and paid out only when they are claimed on the EVM chain. The Lokinet team continues to make good progress, having merged the major wire protocol refactor PR into a branch which we are now working on top of. 

Session

Session Android

• Fix unsend request issue

• Ongoing work to overhaul onboarding process

• Ongoing code review and fixes for disappearing messages overhaul

• Ongoing work on closed group improvements chunk 1

• Fix foreground services crash for Android 14 devices

• Drop unprocessed attachment jobs which may have been causing crashes

• Fix further Android 14 crashes 

Session Desktop

• Ongoing work on closed group improvements chunk 1 

• Update development documentation to give more information about using strings appropriately

• WIP: Add setting to follow system theming

• Update to shift +enter toggle PR

• Ongoing code review and fixes for disappearing messages overhaul

Session iOS 

• Fix bugs and crashes around media interactions by moving to iOS native media viewer

• Ongoing work on closed group improvements chunk 1 

• Updates to onboarding designs based on new feedback

• Ongoing changes to disappearing messages from QA feedback

LibSession 

• Backport return-good-hashes change from `dev` to `stable`

Oxen Core  

• Additional changes to Ethyl

• Finish Merkle tree implementation 

Lokinet

• Ongoing work on path messages in new comms protocol 

• Merged ongoing huge communication overhaul PR into a “quic-wip” branch to better ongoing changes in more, smaller PRs

Marketing

This week we dropped this video on our YouTube channel breaking revealing the truth (👀) about private messaging apps. This vid tackles some of the misinformation and misunderstanding we see across the secure messaging space, and points out criticisms of some of the biggest players in the game (we’re looking at you, Whatsapp and Telegram). We’ve been talking about privacy washing for years — and private messaging apps are keen to clean up their image as more and more people take an interest in privacy. This was the first content to drop since the launch of SessionTV, and it's great to see so much positive sentiment around the video and the content direction — this particular video raked in 80% more views in its first 24 hours than the channel average.

On the Session Token side of things, Josh and the team continued to workshop core messaging and colour concepts — this process has evolved a lot and next week we will start to build out wireframes and copy for the child pages of the new website. Alex and Wes also finished some R&D into a new community hub which will likely be built on Discord. The team will build this out over the next couple of weeks and trial some exciting new stuff for the community before we launch.

In terms of Session support, we updated many of the articles found on our Session support hub to better align with our current version of the app. Over time copy and assets that pertain to older versions of Session need to be audited and updated – so we had Wes and Alex whip up the content for that and implement the changes. 

And finally our graphic designer put together this great new shadow series for the Session Twitter. The latest one that dropped this week performed great on socials and shows the community is highly receptive to us experimenting with newer design concepts. Expect more of this kind of stuff as we continue to push the Session brand forward in parallel with developing the Session Token brand.

That's all for this week folks, catch you next time.