Another follow up, a bit belated. The next day, Wednesday, I tried once more, and this time registration worked again. So there appears to be an element of luck at play.
Hi there now i am on the last Version fron Whisperfish.
I noticed that all messages i get, there is only the uuid shown but not the clear Name.
I tested option contacts from Signal oder contacts from phone.
Then i activate Developer option in whisperfish and saw this option see picture.
Hidden-sender-mode ?
Is this a option from the contacts or from whisperfish?
Thank you
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You have “(no name)” as the contact name, right? We’ve fixed that upstream meanwhile, that was indeed an issue.
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yes…
you think that is the issue? i remember that i have a similar issue long ago.
here it is
It’s definitely a new issue in the current release: contact profiles do not get stored. There was some refactoring and a weird SQLite hiccup happened. No known workaround, sadly, but we should release soon again.
We have some refactoring in the lower layers happening as well, because Signal is rewiring some stuff on the server side, to make API calls a bit more uniform across different clients. Ideally, those would be the same release. In practice, we might need an LLVM and Rust bump…
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Regarding the merging of old messages: is this something that someone relatively fluent in SQL could quickly cobble on the command line?
(e.g.: like merging the SMS histories between two different installs of SailfishOS)
Or is there something really WF or Signal specific (like a change in the encryption key used in the storage of the history)?
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It’s indeed this. You can probably do a quick-and-dirty merge of messages only based on the recipient ACI, but ideally we would also merge a whole bunch of key material.
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BTW, do you have any vague idea when you could tackle the importer?
- is it more a “Sorry, too overwhelmed by work, not going to happen in 2025, maybe in 2026 if we’re lucky?” situation?
- or more a “actually I have some code in a test branch on git, if you mind giving it a try!” situation?
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Ihave the same issue.
Would it be possible to show the phone number or the related contact instead?
It’s more the former than the latter, sadly. I am actually very much surprised on how little I miss my old messages.
For the (no name) issue, we actually fixed that on Git, so we should just release this.
Signal stopped sharing phone numbers by default a long while ago, and we actually do fall back on the phone number if available already. So if you’re not seeing it, it’s not even available!
We should implement phone number lookup though, then a lot more phone numbers should become visible. Pretty annoying this way.
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Also, group update messages handling is also progressing nicely (knocks on wood)! Everything has been implemented* and roughly half of it has been tested, so it should land, uh, sometime in the near future 
*) There’s plenty of QML work on top of that to be done still, but that can be done afterwards - the “new” features are just as unimplemented regardless 
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Wishing you good luck with the limited available time!
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Hello,
This might be a silly question, but I can’t seem to start a new chat…
I cannot access any contacts or start new chats. WIll I have to wait for someone to write to me?
You’ll have to link a Signal Desktop to Whisperfish. You can then initiate new chats using it.
Linking devices can be found in Whisperfish main page → pulley menu → Settings → pulley menu → Linked devices (iirc).
I linked and have tested friend initiated chats, but I cannot start a new chat.
do group chats work?
When I pull down the menu I get Reconnect, About whisperfush, Settings
I linked the phone as a primary device, it’s linked, but I cant start a new chat from anywhere
As mentioned, you create the new chats from the linked Signal desktop app, not Whisperfish.
Sorry for my confusion, do I need to start new chats from the Signal desktop app? Why is this? It doesn’t seem very practical?
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Because contact discovery in Signal is quite an involved task, and none of us had the time or energy to build it out yet. Either you start new conversations from a linked device (a primary Signal Android also works), or your contact should initiate the conversation.
In practice, in my experience, it’s hardly ever an inconvenience. And if it doesn’t inconvenience me or Matti enough, we’re probably not implementing it soon… contributions are welcome! For example, you could contribute by adding this information to the FAQ (at Frequently Asked Questions · Wiki · Whisperfish / Whisperfish - Signal on Sailfish OS · GitLab), I think it would help newcomers a lot! (Also, “how do I link a device” could be a nice entry for the FAQ)
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