Cwtch 1.13 is now available for download!

Cwtch is a communication application (and associated libraries) that uses Tor v3 Onion Services to establish surveillance resistant channels between people. Cwtch has been designed to be secure, private, and resilient.

Cwtch 1.13 is the culmination of the last few years of effort by the Cwtch team, and is the first release that meets our bar to be labelled a Cwtch Stable candidate.

While much more work remains, we are now very confident in the state of the Cwtch library, and the Cwtch UI. We are prepared to make certain commitments regarding peer-to-peer messaging, the UI, and experimental interfaces. In this post we will chart the journey that got us to this point, highlight what is in this new release, and talk about our next steps.

The next large step for the Cwtch project to take is a move from public Beta to Stable – marking a point at which we consider Cwtch to be secure and usable. We have been working hard towards that goal over the last year.

Today, as we approach the release of Cwtch Stable we would like to provide another update on the ongoing work, and the remaining blockers to certifying a Cwtch Stable release. We also have a new nightly to test out!

There is a new Nightly build are available from our build server. The latest nightly we recommend testing is 2023-08-22-23-27-v1.12.0-25-ge019f.

This nightly contains a first cut of support for Whonix, a new global setting for managing how conversation history is preserved, in addition to several bug fixes reported in the last nightly.

Please see the contribution documentation for advice on submitting feedback

There is a new Nightly build are available from our build server. The latest nightly we recommend testing is 2023-08-02-20-24-v1.12.0-19-g75b7.

This nightly contains a first cut of Conversation Search, in addition to several bug fixes impacting effectiveness of the contact retry plugin when combined with a large contact list, and an unstable network connection. Finally we have made a few tweaks to the font scaling based on feedback.

Please see the contribution documentation for advice on submitting feedback

As we journey ever closer to a Cwtch Stable candidate we would like to take this opportunity to ensure that those who have contributed to Cwtch over the years have the option to be credited in some way.

If you have participated in the development process in any way e.g. protocol design, writing code, UI design, writing tests, testing release candidates, reporting issues, translating the application or documentation, promoting metadata resistant applications or any other meaningful contribution to the Cwtch ecosystem we want to offer you the option to have your name or handle credited in both the source code repository and the application itself.

Earlier this year we talked about the changes we have made to make Cwtch Bindings Reproducible.

In this devlog we will talk about how the Cwtch UI are currently built, the changes we have made to Cwtch UI to make future distributions verifiable, and the next steps we will be taking to make all Cwtch builds reproducible.

This will be useful to anyone who is looking to reproduce Cwtch UI builds specifically, and to anyone who wants to start implementing reproducible builds in their own project.

The next large step for the Cwtch project to take is a move from public Beta to Stable – marking a point at which we consider Cwtch to be secure and usable. We have been working hard towards that goal over the last few months.

This post revisits the Cwtch Stable roadmap update we provided back in March, and provides an overview of the next steps on our journey towards Cwtch Stable.

Cwtch 1.12 is now available for download!

Cwtch 1.12 is the culmination of the last few months of effort by the Cwtch team, and includes many foundational changes that pave the way for Cwtch Stable including new features like profile attributes, support for new platforms like Tails, and multiple improvements to performance and stability.

We are getting close to a 1.12 release. This week we are drawing attention to the latest Cwtch Nightly (2023-06-05-17-36-v1.11.0-74-g0406) that is now available for wider testing.

As a reminder, the Open Privacy Research Society have also announced they are want to raise $60,000 in 2023 to help move forward projects like Cwtch. Please help support projects like ours with a one-off donations or recurring support via Patreon.

One of the larger remaining goals outlined in our Cwtch Stable roadmap update is comprehensive developer documentation. We have recently spent some time writing the foundation for these documents.

In this devlog we will introduce some of them, and outline the next steps. We also have a new nightly Cwtch release available for testing!

We are very interested in getting feedback on these documents, and we encourage anyone who is excited to build a Cwtch Bot, or even an alternative UI, to read them over and reach out to us with comments, questions, and suggestions!

As a reminder, the Open Privacy Research Society have also announced they are want to raise $60,000 in 2023 to help move forward projects like Cwtch. Please help support projects like ours with a one-off donations or recurring support via Patreon.