Dev

This week has been fairly packed for the whole team, on the Session side our new Android developer completed his first PR! A small but annoying bug with images overflowing text boxes, hopefully many more to come (fixes, not bugs). The Android team also pushed user config message management into QA, which puts us a step closer to release. On the Oxen Core team Sean spent most of his time working on staking transactions in wallet3 investigating why the daemon isn’t picking up wallet3 staking transactions. The Lokinet team continued working on ‘libquickynet’ which as I mentioned last week will hopefully resolve many of the congestion issues which are coming from having a custom wire protocol.

Oxen Core

• Ongoing work on integrating staking transactions into wallet3, investigating stake transaction structuring to ensure they are picked up by dameon

• Ledger Audit kickoff meeting on the 19th of April

Session

Session Android

• Fix missing media download progress

• Fix empty message overflowing behind images (First PR from our new Android developer!)

• User config message management on Android moved into QA this week!

Session iOS

• Fix share screen not showing any conversations/contacts

• Remove entitlements for iCloud and iCloud documents which are not used in Session

• Fix issue which caused synced messages to erroneously  show as sending on the conversations screen

• Disable disappearing message setting when not a group member

• Update iOS Seed Node certificates to use new 2yr certificates

Optimisations and fixes

• Made a couple of DB query optimisations for the Home and Conversation screens

• Removed some compiler-complex global generic functions Increased the timeout for file uploads

• Fixed a few import issues

• Fixed an issue preventing calls on the simulator from working (disable CallKit on the simulator)

• Fixed an issue where opening a conversation with a draft would result in a typing indicator notification being sent (if enabled)

• Fixed a truncation issue on the CallVC

• Fixed an issue where the JobRunner could schedule dependent jobs which were already running (eg. uploading attachments multiple times)

• Fixed an issue where the image used for quotes might not be the first in an album message

• Fixed an issue where sending an album message wouldn't send attachments in the correct order

• Fixed an issue where album attachments wouldn't be downloaded in the correct order

Session Desktop

• Ongoing work on user config message management

• Significant work going into getting libsession compiling on all platforms

• Add ability for CI to report unit test coverage on each PR

Lokinet

• “Libquicinet” generic QUIC communications library (WIP, no PR yet)

• Embedded lokinet (liblokinet) ongoing bug fixes and stabilisation

• Ongoing lokinet core refactor

Marketing

Did you catch Monerotalk this week? If you did, you may have recognised none other than our own Kee Jefferies, who had a very spirited and insightful discussion with host Doug Tuman about all things privacy and crypto. It was a really great conversation, and in our opinion stands as one of the most informative and interesting media appearances we’ve done. Check it out here. Monerotopia prep continues, with the conference now less than three weeks away. We continued promoting Kee and Alexs role in the event, and pushed out some email marketing to spread the word. We even have our own promo code — use the code SESSION for a handsome discount if you are interested in meeting us there!

As usual Alex, Cam and I have been working away on the Oxen brand refresh, and work has continued on the promotional campaign that will be executed alongside the changes to the brand. We have plans in place for a PR campaign, we’re zeroing in on the influencers we think can be valuable to the project, and are doing some preliminary tests with display advertising on high-traffic crypto websites.

These promotional tactics are designed as top-of-funnel channels which maximise brand awareness and are accompanied by a call to action which moves someone further down our funnel, giving us greater opportunities to hammer home Oxens core value propositions to build a narrative around the project. These tactics are fundamental to any marketing campaign, but brand awareness advertising will be especially important for us because this campaign will launch alongside some very big and exciting changes to the brand.

Alex, Tim, Cam and Wes have also been working on retention-focussed promotional strategies which come into play at the later stages of our marketing funnel. As our community grows during this period, we will employ a new Community Engagement Strategy and a new social media strategy in order to incentivise people to remain in our community and deliver the knock-out blows that our messaging strategy has been building towards from the earliest stages of the campaign.

We’re super excited to share more about the brand refresh and our launch campaign with you guys in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.