Whisperfish - The unofficial SailfishOS Signal client

Applications
#1033

We are close indeed! I (barely) managed to register my burner account Whisperfish as primary device yesterday, and (after a long, winding battle) even send and receive messages with my daily driver Whisperfish and Signal Desktop! There are still a lot of kinks to iron out - a few nasty ones too.

But, there’s still the linking another device to Whisperfish, and linking Whisperfish as a secondary device, so don’t hold your breath just yet! They should^tm follow a lot easier though.

Thanks for the support and patience!

12 Likes
#1034

Sorry for the wait, but it’s finally here. There is one important caveat: if you currently have a working, linked (secondary) Whisperfish installation, it will currently not be able to correctly handle PNI, as we missed the migration messages. A work-around is to relink your Whisperfish by resetting it, removing the linked device in Signal Android (or Molly, or Signal-iOS; you primary device), and adding it again.

In principle, we should implement the relinking with retention of your messages, but that is still a lot of work.

There are some reports of Whisperfish not connecting the first time you start it after the upgrade. A restart of the app should fix it, but I’m interested in the logs of installations where this happens!

Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.25

PNI support, fixes registration and linking

Changes

  • Support PNI (except for pre-beta-25 linked devices)
  • Nicely display service messages (joined group, changed group, …)
  • Fix an edge case crash in message mark up rendering
  • Fix a crash on PNI-only contacts
  • Fix audio message playback with a headset connected
  • Generate blurhash when sending pictures
  • Fix broken shareplugin
12 Likes
#1035

Hooray !!
Thank you very much !
Going to test it immediately

Works for me.
Did link WF as second devive
Thank you!

2 Likes
#1036

It’s working again - thanks a lot for this update. You made my day!!!

2 Likes
#1037

Thank you for your continued work on WF! Greatly appreciated. This is the absolute gem in the Sailfish world :relaxed:

Do I read correctly that linking (and relinking) of WF as a secondary device works again?

#1038

Yes, both linking and registration should work again!

However: if you currently have a working linked Whisperfish, it does not automatically get updated to be PNI-compatible, and you will not see any new conversations on that device.

So:

  1. Pre-beta.25 existing registration + Whisperfish is primary: OK :white_check_mark:
  2. Pre-beta.25 existing registration + Whisperfish is secondary/linked: problem with new conversations :x: (Implement PNI (#459) · Issues · Whisperfish / Whisperfish - Signal on Sailfish OS · GitLab)
  3. Post-beta.25 new registration + Whisperfish is primary: OK :white_check_mark:
  4. Post-beta.25 new registration + Whisperfish is secondary/linked: OK :white_check_mark:

A workaround for (2) is to unlink the device, remove the data directory (perform a reset) and link Whisperfish cleanly: that brings you into situation (4), but erases all your conversations from your device.

2 Likes
#1039

Oh, sorry, now I saw from previous message the Pawel.Spoon already had success with it. Will try it myself too.

1 Like
#1040

That sounds like I’ll have to dig into backup and restore next… :sweat_smile:

The PNI work in beta.25 was a massive effort from @rubdos, and it was a complex thing to pull off. All the kudos for that! Now we can start implementing even more missing features.

Displaying service messages (group gets a new member, disappearing messages adjusted etc.) was more than halfway done by @ichthyosaurus, so I picked it up and made those happen! Suddenly Whisperfish looks a lot more polished! :sparkles: There’s a lot of new strings to translate in that front, so please check out the translations in Weblate:

Finally, a few more changes worth noting:

  • Scrolling is a bit smoother
  • Stickers now show the emoji “inside the sticker”
3 Likes
#1041

Our releases are so packed of stuff that I glance over certain things that get merged nowadays :’-)

#1042

I see a lot of ‘The group was updated’ but still no ‘xyz joined via an invitation’ or similar. Is that expected?

#1043

I am in your category 1. However, I am unable to link an ipad as a secondary device. It fails with a generic error message on the tablet. Is it your thoughts that linking/adding secondary devices to a primary whisperfish account should now be working?
Thanks for all the work and the continuing updates,

1 Like
#1044

That is still intentional. We don’t support group update messages yet (which provides that info) and fall back to updating the full group instead.

#1045

I have just linked Signal Desktop with my old Whisperfish install so at least that works still. There is a delay when SD waits for some reply from WF which we don’t yet provide. Signal for Ipad can be more sensitive to those, perhaps that’s the cause…?

We don’t have any iPads to test with. Could you retry the registration with Whisperfish verbose logs enabled and send them to us (censored)? (Wiki link in the fiest post.)

1 Like
#1046

After getting your message, I thought I should try linking signal desktop, and that worked well. No problems, the link was completed successfully.
I tried the iPad again, leaving some time between attempts, and still no luck. I recorded logs, censured and posted here Linking of iPad as secondary device currently seems not to be working on beta 25 (#652) · Issues · Whisperfish / Whisperfish - Signal on Sailfish OS · GitLab .
I tried a few times whilst logging, though attempt 2 & 3 hit a rate limiter, though I think attempt 1 did not.
Let me know if I can try anything further or collect any more logs,
Thanks again,

2 Likes
#1047

Hi, today, I updated Whisperfish to the new version. Since I previously had it linked as a secondary device, I performed a reset an linked it agein. This worked perfectly fine, so thank you!

But since everything is working again with the new version now, I noticed that in groups, the Signal profile names are shown instead of the ones from my contacts. I did select the option to prioritise device contacts, and for direct messages it works, but in groups for some reason the profile names are shown.

Does anybody else have this issue?

#1048

Signal (Whisperfish) profiles and Sailfish OS contacts are linked together by using phone numbers. As Signal does not deliver phone numbers any more by default, they can’t be matched. This is actually a very good point, thanks for bringing it up!

There actually is a way to still link users in Whisperfish with contacts in Sailfish OS, but I can’t recall how I did it… It had to be done manually for every contact though. Anyway, stay tuned!

3 Likes
#1049

When reacting to messages, WF used to display the reacted smiley underneath the message instantly. Nowadays I need to swipe to main screen and back to message screen for it to update.

If I remember right … this started to occur when updating to Beta.24…(maybe Beta.23?)…but anyhow Beta.24 and Beta.25 are atleast affected… :slightly_smiling_face:

#1050

Hmm, yes, I noticed that too but didn’t make an issue yet.

1 Like
#1051

I noticed that too - it should work as before but it does not… I’ll bisect the issue some time during the weekend, I think.

#1052

Don’t bisect too far, migrations are scary :slight_smile: