Devlog 11: Fixing a few bugs and getting the app ready to ship

So in this time i havent done a lot of like cool stuff rather i was fixing a few bugs that broke the messaging feature and image attachment loading because i wanted to showcase those in my demo video and i fixed the github action so ppl can download an apk for the latest version if they want to try it out on their own legacy device also sorry for not writing a dev log sooner i was kinda busy but now i finally got the time to get the project into a ready to ship state

Devlog 10: Finally added image sending/receiving support

So the next thing i taught i would add to my app is image sending and receiving support because that is like kinda a basic feature that any messaging app needs so i added

• image reviving
• sending images from the phones storage and via taking a picture with the camera

adding these was kinda annoying with figuring out all the correct endpoints and stuff but i think it was worth it in the end

Devlog 9: New features and a bit of an ui overhaul

So I decided to make the ui a bit more pretty and a few new features
So this is what i added:

• a new cleaner ui
• contact profile picture support
• message time stamping in the ui
• dark theme and theme switcher with persistence

these are just like qol improvements that i decided to add into the app nothing special but like i missed a few features like the dark theme myself so nothing major but i hope these changes makes the app more usable to ppl

Devlog 8 Working name syncing

So after a lot of work i finally made it work so it can show the name that you entered on the signal set up or the devices not just the phone numbers or just unknown sender or just the user id on my app so i guess another feature added now but i still want to add a few stuff before shipping

Devlog 7: Partly finally working message send/receive

So after a lot of work i finally managed to get message sending and receiving working with all of their related crypto stuff but its kinda broken because our message sending api does not support sealed sender yet only the old legacy unsealed sender api that does not encrypt the sender data like modern signal does so on all of the replies it says that they came from unknown contact rather then the actual contact so im working on implementing that so the current stage of the project is after 3x hours of development is
Whats working:

• registering onto the signal network via the phone number and the captchas
• receiving messages
  Whats not working or only partially working:
• sending messages (not working fully because the sealed sender stuff that i talked about previously)

Devlog 6 Discoverability finally works

So after a lot of pain and trial and error and using the signal android source code as an some sort of example that how does the protocol work now we have a finally working code and i can finally move onto the message encryption/decryption part and make it work

Debugging hell pt2

sorry guys i have been on vacation and taking a bit of a break from the project because of it but now its back in active development now but sadly after fixing registration there is another problem my phone with the latest signal client sadly cant find my client says that its not registered some why even tho it successfully registers so im working trying to fix that possibly and make this project work finally

Devlog 4: Finally working registration

So after like 15 hours of continuous work and debugging i can finally now say that the registration and connection to the signal network is finally working now and i can finally move onto actually making the app itself rather then just having to do trial and error debugging with libsignal and the protocol also while i was testing the app i made a working ci pipeline so the app could be actually downloaded by other ppl now that took a few attempts because of the setting up of the rust toolchains stuff and the android ndk setup part having a few bugs but that is working too now

Devlog 3: Stuck in debuging hell

I’m sorry yall that i didnt make any devlogs about this but i taught this was kinda boring and nothing to write about but after last devlog i found out that the my registration api wasnt fully finished and i needed to generate more keys after the user enters the code from the sms and the registration itself starts but for that we needed to use signals cryptography lib called libsignal so i tried that but the latest version of libsignal had a newer type of elf hash that android 4.x didnt support so i tried using an older version of libsignal but that still didnt work cause it used a few instructions that newer android versions introduced so i tried binary patching in the missing instructions but that still didnt work so i decided the only viable solution was to fork libsignal to try to manually backport everything and thats where im stuck now in debugging hell trying to manually backport and replace the api calls that it uses with the older android versions and its been like 9 hours of trying to do this and still nothing so im kinda tired trying to do this but im wishing that i will finally fix everything and could move onto making that actual app itself rather then then trying to make libsignal work
Thank you for reading this super long devlog!

Devlog 2 Polishing the ui and adding more underlying stuff that we will need in the future so

So in this we added to two big changes

• First is the completely reworked set up it to make it a little bit more pretty and polished looking
• And the other one is its a more of an underlying change but a well needed one because in the previous demos it stored the key pairs in plain text and stuff so that is obviously super dangerous in a secure messaging context so it will now let you encrypt it via a pin you set in the account creation like in the real signal

First devlog for this new project

So i taught that i made tidal for legacy android and it was pretty easy this is going to be easy like that but how naive was i am like getting even the signal sms registration almost took 4 hours of debugging mainly so this is going to be hard but i will try because it will be worth it in the end