On board, shipped 🚢
There has never been a better time to invite your family and friends to Session. The re-designed onboarding flow has successfully shipped—the culmination of several rounds of user testing and research. The upgrade is available right now, on Android, iOS, and Desktop.
Session is a very popular web3 application. Like, 500,000+ downloads a month popular. The re-designed onboarding flow aims to bolster retention, reshaping Session’s first impression to make all those people downloading more likely to stick around for the long run.
If you’re yet to try out the app yourself or you’ve been hesitant to sit down and onboard others in your life, this is your sign to change that.
Don’t crash, dummy 🦺
Alongside the new onboarding flow, August saw minor releases shipped on all platforms. These releases include many small optimisations, bug fixes, and performance upgrades. Following the release of Android 1.19.2, the crash rate on Session for Android has been reduced by 90% since July.
Here’s an overview of some of the updates packaged in these releases:
Desktop:
- Adjusting UI elements for cross-platform parity 💻📲
- Performance upgrades for saving debug logs 🪵
- Bug fix for attachment previews 📩
Android:
- Bug fix for path view animation 🏡
- Rewrote media gallery using Jetpack Compose 🚀
- SecureRandom and SnodeAPI optimisation 🧑💻
iOS:
- Fixed several bugs that could cause message to be stuck in ‘Sending’ state 📨
- Fixed a bug that could cause a startup crash 🚀
- Networking optimisations and improvements 🛜
End of the string🧵
Session is within striking distance of shipping its next major release: unified, cross-platform text strings. The new strings are finalised and ready to be integrated into the app, pending localisation. The Session community has made major inroads with translating the new strings into their local language(s) on CrowdIn (in collaboration with professional translators) in order to achieve rock solid translations across 81 languages.
If you want to join the party, you can do so here.
Beyond strings, another major release will be an overhaul to group chats that will iron out some existing bugs and allow groups to seamlessly accommodate up to 100 people. Stay tuned for more.
Two fiddy 🪙
There has been major progress on the road to mainnet launch this month, with over 320 active testnet nodes, new testnet features deployed and major challenges identified and overcome in close collaboration with the Session Token community.
After the testnet was temporarily paused to address ongoing network issues, a major upgrade was released, including a reboot of the network, a relaunch of the test SENT token contract and major fixes to issues identified by testnet node operators with node syncing and registration.
This upgrade also changed the rewards rate to test the mainnet genesis reward provision, as well as a security feature of Session's tokenomics where network nodes can only make gradual changes to the actual rewards the smart contract is allowed to give out.
The next upgrade will update the full stake amount to match the new, higher rewards rate on testnet. New features in the Staking Portal are also being rolled out, including Claim Rewards, allowing users to claim their test SENT rewards from running testnet nodes.
The Unlock Stake feature will be released next week, allowing users to unlock their test SENT stake at any time. Testnet node operators have been providing valuable feedback to improve the Staking Portal’s UX and performance ahead of mainnet.
Write, edit, rewrite ✏️
Lokinet is undergoing a significant overhaul, with major sections of the codebase being totally re-written. The Lokinet rewrite has significantly streamlined the entire code base by replacing complex, abstracted components with simpler, more robust implementations.
This involved consolidating multiple virtual classes into single, more efficient classes and switching to a more reliable event loop. Additionally, Lokinet is now pioneering the deployment of the libQUIC in this type of environment, requiring ongoing adjustments to balance standard protocol requirements with the capabilities of open-source libraries.
This has led to necessary bug fixes and feature updates, such as improving ownership models and working on 0RTT implementation.
In the sun ☀️
Decentralised messaging had a moment in the spotlight this month, with particular attention drawn to Session following the controversial arrest of a certain messaging app CEO.
- 20,000+ followers, 2,800 net new followers on app account in the last week
- New total session guide in the works
This coincided with a growth campaign being run by the Session Token Twitter account, creating a vortex of growth that culminated in a major milestone: over 20,000 people now follow Session Token, and the account also reached nearly 50,000 people in one day during August.
That growth is not just limited to the Session Token account — the Session App account also saw major spikes, with nearly 3,000 new followers in the last week alone.
Onward 🧗