Cwtch 1.17 is now available for download!

Open Privacy put all hands on deck this summer, and Cwtch 1.17 contains a massive update: an experimental new feature we call Hybrid Groups. Hybrid Groups are a major Cwtch protocol upgrade that allow us to implement long-desired features such as group membership controls and moderation functions.

This post goes into the details of how Hybrid Groups work, and also discuss some of the other great updates in Cwtch 1.17, like P2P connectivity improvements and an important Tor compatibility update. We also discuss how we are managing Cwtch translations going forward, and put out a request for new and existing translators to join us on a new, more human-centric translation platform.

The Problem with Untrusted Infrastructure Cwtch Groups​

One of the unique features of Cwtch is that groups are dependent on untrusted infrastructure. This means your group can be hosted on any server, and that server's operator will be unable to glean information about who is using it or for what purpose.

Untrusted infrastructure, however, comes with an efficiency cost. Bandwidth usage scales with the number of groups using the server, rather than the size of the individual group. Counterintuitively, this means there is even some bandwidth usage in the background, when there is no activity within your groups.

Many Cwtch users are on mobile devices, or otherwise slow or metered connections, and so we balanced the desire for untrusted infrastructure by severely limiting the feature set of group conversations. There are no member lists, moderators, or channel settings like many people have come to expect from modern messaging clients.

Hybrid groups are our way of bringing these modern features to Cwtch.

Hybrid Groups​

Hybrid Groups allow you to use trusted infrastructure to host your group. You can host a group yourself from within the Cwtch client itself (desktop only), or you can use our upcoming standalone daemon to host them on a server you control. The important distinction from Untrusted Infrastructure Groups is that the person hosting the group will have access to the group messages and metadata. You should only join groups hosted by people you trust. Untrusted Infrastructure Groups are still supported, and both types require separate opt-ins via the Experiment toggles in your Cwtch settings.

Group messages and actions will be routed through the group host using our battle-tested onion-to-onion P2P connections. If some group members are offline when messages are sent, they will be delivered next time they go online and connect to the group host.

Member roles​

The first major feature provided by Hybrid Groups is membership control and roles. When joining a group, you'll be able to see who else is in that group:

We took some inspiration from IRC when designing our roles, and settled on: admins (*), operators (@), moderators (%), voices (v), and users (•). The permissions these roles have is determined by this chart:

Group modes​

Hybrid groups also offer eight (for now) toggle-able group modes, allowing channel operators to customize a group to fit its purpose. Here's the list:

We hope these modes will enable a wide variety of use cases for Hybrid Groups. You could make an "announcements only" group by setting +ov, or you could make a sensitive reporting channel with +w (which makes the group act like a ballot box that only mods can read).

Moderation​

Safety is always at the front of our minds when designing features for Cwtch. We are excited to finally be able to offer moderation features in line with that goal, and we hope you'll find our implementation flexible enough to meet a variety of different needs.

• Hiding messages: Moderators can "hide" a message for all users, which is a UI-only effect. Other mods, or tech-savvy users, can still review a hidden message locally. Mods can choose to un-hide ("reveal") a message again later.
• Hide by default mode (+m): All messages to a group in +m mode will arrive pre-hidden. Users will know a message was posted, but won't be able to review it until a moderator reveals it. Moderators get a "preview" function to help decide whether to reveal a message.
• Deleting messages: Alternatively, moderators can delete a message, and the message will also be deleted for every user of the group. This action is not reversible and results in the message being replaced with a placeholder on disk (so other members will be able to tell that a message was deleted).

Access control​

Groups can be invitation-only (the default), or they can be open (+o). See below for an example of an open group that anyone can join! You could also set anyone-can-invite (+i) to enable anyone, including regular users, to invite new people to the group.

Moderators can kick people from the group, and this will also ban them if the group is (+o). Moderators can of course later unban users as well. Users are naturally free to leave groups themselves at any time, and can even block a group from re-adding them.

Getting started​

After enabling Hybrid Groups under Experiments in your Cwtch settings, you can join our test group by adding the following contact:

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To host your own group (Cwtch desktop only for now), hit the Groups button on the main Cwtch screen and add a new group with one of your profiles selected as its admin. From there, you can use the Edit Group settings to configure the group to your liking, then use the Membership settings to add people and promote them to various roles.

Like any major new feature, there are bound to be some bugs in Hybrid Groups at first. We'd love if you reported any bugs you encountered to us!

Other improvements in Cwtch 1.17​

While working on Hybrid Groups, we fixed a metric tonne of other logic and issues throughout the Cwtch connection engine. You may notice connections starting up faster when you launch Cwtch or add new contacts, disconnecting less often, and generally being more stable.

We've also patched numerous UI issues on both desktop and Android.

Cwtch 1.17 also updates its bundled Tor to version 0.4.9.11. This is important as the older version of Tor will reach end-of-life soon. Installations configured to use a non-bundled Tor daemon will continue to work as usual.

We fixed a crash on devices running Android v10 or older, which was caused by a Go update.

With Cwtch 1.17, we are no longer supporting profiles from Cwtch 1.4 and older. If you have an old profile that was never used with Cwtch 1.5+ (released December 21st, 2021), you will need to first load your profile in Cwtch 1.16 before upgrading to Cwtch 1.17.

Calling all translators!​

We absolutely love our amazing volunteer translators who have helped translate Cwtch into 24 different languages!

Unfortunately, the timing of Cwtch 1.17 coincided with the end of open-source support from our old translation platform, which is going AI-first. We value the human touch on our translations as much as our code, and so have decided to move to a self-hosted translation platform. If you've done translations for Cwtch before or want to get started, please reach out and we'll send you an invite to the new system!

Cwtch remains fully translated in 24 languages everywhere except the new Hybrid Groups features, and we hope to cut a follow-up release soon getting us back up to 100% translated.

Download Cwtch 1.17​

You can download Cwtch from https://cwtch.im/download.

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Alternatively we also provide a releases-only RSS feed.

A special thanks to the amazing volunteer translators and testers who made this release possible.

Reproducible Bindings​

Cwtch 1.17 is based on libCwtch version libCwtch-autobindings-2026-08-31-12-36-v0.3.0. The repliqate scripts to reproduce our build environment can be found here: https://git.openprivacy.ca/sarah/repliqate-runner

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

You can download Cwtch from https://docs.cwtch.im/download.

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Alternatively we also provide a releases-only RSS feed.

In This Release​

A special thanks to the amazing volunteer translators and testers who made this release possible.

Cwtch 1.16.1 is small update in scope, but reflected a large amount of work under the surface to improve and modernize our dependency stack.

• New Features:
  • New Encrypted Database Backend - The Cwtch Team have invested in updating our encrypted database backend. Prior to 1.16.1 Cwtch relied on an outdated go wrapper for sqlcipher with libTomCrypt for encryption. This dependency had not received updates in many years, and was lagging behind sqlcipher and sqlite releases. We have now forked and adopted this dependency under the name go-sqlcipher, invested in new maintenance scripts that make updating easier, and migrated the C-based crypto backed to a new memory-safe one based on standard, and audited go crypto.
  • Memory Tagging Extension Safe - With the upgrade of our encrypted database backed we also took the opportunity to replace the less than ideal usage of GoString from the libSqlite3 go dependency. These calls are now wrapped with a go function that ensure safe memory reads and should no longer result in Cwtch being killed when MTE in enabled on ARM platforms.
• Bug Fixes / Improvements:
  • Cwtch is now based on Flutter 3.29
  • Fixes to retry cooldown to prevent long-delays when an initial connection attempt fails. This should result in faster connections to online friends.
• Accessibility / UX:
  • Core translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Danish , Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian , Romanian , Russian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh
  • Partial translations for Korean (41%), Japanese (26%), , Luxembourgish (19%), Greek (15%), Uzbek (9%), and Portuguese (5%)

Reproducible Bindings​

Cwtch 1.16.1 is based on libCwtch version libCwtch-autobindings-v0.2.0. The repliqate scripts to reproduce these bindings from source can be found at https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/repliqate-scripts/src/branch/main/cwtch-autobindings-v0.2.0

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

You can download Cwtch from https://docs.cwtch.im/download.

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Alternatively we also provide a releases-only RSS feed.

In This Release​

A special thanks to the amazing volunteer translators and testers who made this release possible.

• New Features:
  • Managed Groups Alpha - This Cwtch release contains the first iteration of managed groups, allowing a dedicated (and trusted) cwtch peer to host a multi-person chat. To volunteer to test out this new feature please join the Release Candidate Testers group and ask for an invite.
  • Private Profile Labels - You can now give each of your profiles a local-only descriptive name.
• Bug Fixes / Improvements:
  • Cwtch is now based on Flutter 3.22
  • Cwtch on Linux now uses the Flutter-provided fl_dart_project_set_aot_library_path method (contributed by Dan), rather than our own custom solution.
  • File Download verification attempts with incomplete/missing manifests will now allow attempt to redownload the manifest rather than emitting an error.
  • Cwtch will now correctly connect to the Tor Service in Tails OS > 6.0
  • Importing Unencrypted Profiles no longer requires entering the defecto password
  • When the clickable links experiment is enabled, message Formatting now priotizes code formatting over linking. Thanks @psyduck
  • When the image previews experiment is enabled, images are now previewed in their original aspect ratio. Thanks @psyduck
  • Source Tarballs are now also packaged during the release process
  • The Windows installer is now signed
  • New deb package release option (beta, please help us test!)
  • New Synergy Theme, for those who want Cwtch to look like an enterprise product
• Accessibility / UX:
  • Core translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Danish , Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian , Romanian , Russian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh
  • Partial translations for Korean (41%), Japanese (26%), , Luxembourgish (19%), Greek (15%), Uzbek (9%), and Portuguese (5%)
  • Theme Refresh - Many small adjustments to existing themes to make them more accessible

Reproducible Bindings​

Cwtch 1.15 is based on libCwtch version libCwtch-autobindings-2024-09-05-11-07-v0.1.3. The repliqate scripts to reproduce these bindings from source can be found at https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/repliqate-scripts/src/branch/main/cwtch-autobindings-v0.1.3

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

You can download Cwtch from https://cwtch.im/download.

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Alternatively we also provide a releases-only RSS feed.

In This Release​

A special thanks to the amazing volunteer translators and testers who made this release possible.

• New Features:
  • Custom Themes - You can now load custom themes into Cwtch.
  • Message View Backgrounds - This release contains the first support for (optional) background images in the message view. Future releases will allow per-conversation images.
• Bug Fixes / Improvements:
  • Fixed tor connectivity in newer Tails releases
  • Fixes in the Retry Plugin for better managing of a large number of contacts
  • Several UX improvements for font scaling, and styling
  • Fixed Android File Sharing Bug which prevent downloads of non-previewed files.
  • Fixed Android File Sharing Bug that resulted in a UI reset triggered by a rate race condition between reconnection and new message arriving
  • Split Settings Pane into multiple tabs for easier navigation of options
  • Fixed contact row date time/localization inconsistency
  • Fixed contact row issue where LANG wasn't set on some linux systems
  • libCwtch now support older Mac releases (min 10.12)
  • Updates images and descriptions in the Windows Installer
• Accessibility / UX:
  • Core translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Danish , Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian , Romanian , Russian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh
  • Partial translations for Korean (41%), Japanese (26%), , Luxembourgish (19%), Greek (15%), Uzbek (9%), and Portuguese (5%)
  • Theme Refresh - Many small adjustments to existing themes to make them more accessible

Reproducible Bindings​

Cwtch 1.14 is based on libCwtch version libCwtch-autobindings-2024-02-12-11-04-v0.0.12. The repliqate scripts to reproduce these bindings from source can be found at https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/repliqate-scripts/src/branch/main/cwtch-autobindings-v0.0.12

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

In this post we will introduce the new enhanced permissions api in libCwtch, explain why it is needed, and how future releases of Cwtch will manage conversation-level permissions.

How do conversation-level permissions work in Cwtch right now?​

Underneath the libCwtch API, all conversations maintain an access control list. For peer-to-peer conversations this list has a single entry, keyed by the handle of the contact.

Currently, this access control list only maintains the Blocked-state of the contact. If a user blocks another, then this is where the flag is stored. While there are other fields in this list, they have been unused, until now.

Additionally, each conversation also stored an Accepted flag, indicating if the user has approved a contact request. The Accepted flag has many different effects including whether certain features (like file sharing) are accessible, or whether connection attempts with the contact are tried automatically.

What Are Enhanced Permissions?​

The current approach has several issues; the major issue being that profiles have minimal control over how they interact with contacts. Ideally, you should be able to automatically attempt to connect with a given cwtch user, but not allow file shares, for example.

This is the initial driving use case behind Enhanced Permissions. Exposing this underlying ACL and augmenting it with additional flags like ShareFiles, RenderImages, and AutoConnect.

The API​

Enhanced permissions will be available through a new set of low level libCwtch APIs i.e.:

	UpdateConversationAccessControlList(id int, acl model.AccessControlList) error
	EnhancedUpdateConversationAccessControlList(conversation int, serialized_acl string) error

	GetConversationAccessControlList(conversation int) (model.AccessControlList, error)
	EnhancedGetConversationAccessControlList(conversation int) (string, error)

As with other libCwtch APIs the Enhanced functions speak JSON and be suitable for integration with UIs and other clients that cannot speak the Go model.

AccessControlList maintains it's current structure, while AccessControl itself has been augmented with the fields described in the previous section.

Existing access-control APIs e.g. AcceptConversation, BlockConversation and UnblockConversation have been updated internally to use the augmented AccessControl model, and will be able to be safely used by existing and future clients.

However, the Accepted field in the Conversation model is now considered deprecated, and will be removed in a future Cwtch version.

How will Migration Work?​

To simplify migration newer versions of Cwtch will detect if Enhanced Permissions have been enabled, and if they haven't will automatically turn on all new flags for Accepted conversations. This will maintain behaviour between versions, and should minimize any potential confusion.

You will then be able to modify this ACL on a per-conversation level in the Cwtch UI.

When will Enhanced Permissions be Available?​

We are aiming to roll out a nightly with Enhanced Permissions in the coming weeks. We will then spend some time iterating on the UI to ensure that the new permissions are understandable and usable.

How does this fit into Hybrid Groups?​

That is not the end of the story as far as Enhanced Permissions go. As I mentioned above for peer-to-peer conversations the ACL has a single entry.

For Hybrid Groups, this list will have multiple entries, for each member of the group. This will allow group admins to control who can post to a group, and what kinds of messages they can post.

How this list will be maintained, propagated, and authenticated by group members will be a topic of a future development log.

Stay up to date!​

As always, we will be regularly updating this devlog and other channels as we continue to make progress towards surveillance resistant infrastructure!

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

With the Cwtch interface now stable, we are in a position to begin a new phase in Cwtch development: a Path towards Hybrid Groups.

The Problem with Cwtch Groups​

One of the unique features of Cwtch is that groups are dependent on untrusted infrastructure.

Because of this, at their most basic, a Cwtch group is simply an agreement between a set of peers on a common cryptographic key, and a common (set of) untrusted server(s).

This provides Cwtch Groups with very nice properties such as anonymity to anyone not in the group, but it does mean that certain other nice properties like member flexibility, and credential rotation are difficult to achieve.

We want to allow people to make the right trade-off when it comes to their own risk models, i.e. to be able to trade efficiency for trust when that decision makes sense.

To do that we need to introduce a new class of group into Cwtch, something we are calling Hybrid Groups.

What Are Hybrid Groups?​

The goal of hybrid groups is to balance the security properties of Cwtch peer-to-peer communication with the properties of untrusted infrastructure.

This is done by augmenting existing Cwtch Groups with an additional layer of peer-to-peer communication in order to provide efficient participant management, key rotation, and other useful features.

Levels of Hybrid Groups​

In practice, we imagine there will be a few different levels of Hybrid Group, reflecting different trade-offs between inter-peer trust, communication efficiency, and group security.

There are Traditional Groups, these have similar properties to the existing Cwtch Groups. Highly inefficient, but essentially require zero-trust on behalf of participants other than an expectation that the key is kept secret.

We plan to introduce Managed Groups: A new kind of group where all participants explicitly trust a given always-online peer (e.g. a bot) with group operations. These will be highly efficient, at the cost of that explicit trust (if that peer behaves maliciously then certain properties are broken). Managed groups will be the first Cwtch groups to allow Contractable and Expandable groups, and more efficient Key Rotation.

To start with this trusted peer will take the form of an external bot (powered by a cwtch bot framework) however we eventually plan to expose this capability as part of the Cwtch UI.

And finally a category of Augmented Groups: An extension of Managed Groups that places configurable restrictions of the trust given to the peer e.g. by requiring participants to take part in a meta-protocol that confirms certain actions before they are carried out (preventing the trusted-peer from harming properties like Participant Consistency.

Group Messaging Metadata​

As with the rest of Cwtch, our ultimate goal is that no metadata (and specifically as part of this work, no group metadata e.g. membership, message timing) be available to a party outside of the group.

Traditional Cwtch Groups take this to the extreme, and the expense of long syncing times, and a high possibility of disruption. Managed Groups and Augmented groups will allow communities to make the right trade-offs allowing for greater resilience and faster syncing.

A Rough Timeline (Q1: Week 0 - Week 10 2024)​

• Week 0 - Planning Q1 Cwtch Timeline (this devlog), minor bug fixes and other small UI-focused work originating from reports and feedback from Cwtch testers.
• Week 1 - Work begins on exposing Enhanced Permissions in the Cwtch library. These are essential to implementing many of the aspects of the new group design, as well as improving other parts of contact management. (Expect more about this in a future devlog). Also, a formal model for Managed Groups will be created and documented. This will form the basis of the implementation.
• Week 2 - At this point we should be able to begin designing the Managed Group Extension to Cwtch. This will use the Cwtch Event Hooks API to respond to Peer events to manage groups. During this work, we also expect to migrate the legacy group code into it's own similar extension to make best use of the APIs.
• Week 3 - Towards the end of January we expect to have a complete formal model of Managed Groups and to be able to start integrating the new extensions into the Cwtch-UI. We also expect to be in the process of releasing a new 1.14 version of Cwtch that supports Enhanced Permissions.
• Weeks 4 - Week 6 - February marks the 6th anniversary of the founding of Open Privacy Research Society, and our organizational year end. During this time core members of the Cwtch team are often involved in administrative tasks that need to be done during this time, as such we are not planning to make too much progress on Cwtch during this time.
• Weeks 7 - Week 10 - As we approach March, we will be formally integrating Managed Groups in Cwtch, and planning a Cwtch 1.15 release which will feature the new group type. During this time we will also be updating Cwtch Group Documentation .

Once Managed Groups have been rolled out, we will assess what we have learned and proceed with similar steps for Augmented Groups in Q2 (more on that in a later devlog!).

Stay up to date!​

As always, we will be regularly updating this devlog and other channels as we continue to make progress towards surveillance resistant infrastructure!

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

Cwtch Stable and Beyond!​

Over five years ago, on the 28th June 2018, we published the first official announcement of Cwtch. Throughout 2019 we published various Alpha releases of Cwtch. The original plan was to release a Cwtch Beta in 2020.

Like so many other projects in 2020, Cwtch Beta was delayed, and towards the end of 2020 it became clear that our original approach to a cross-platform UI was not sustainable long term.

Finally, in June 2021 we launched Cwtch Beta 1.0. We have spent the years since refining beta, adding features, and responding to feedback.

We have now reached a pivotal moment in Cwtch, one that the team has been working towards for many years. We now believe that Cwtch has reached a point where people can use core features, and enable experimental features, with a confidence that any risks are well understood and appropriately mitigated. As such we are dropping the "beta" label.

Some features, like automatically downloading and displaying images, will always carry some risk - as such these will always remain off-by-default in Cwtch.

However, if approporate precautions are taken (like never accepting conversations from untrusted entities) then these features can be turned on and used without additional considerable risk.

Further, we believe that the API presented by libCwtch has reached a point where its core design is unlikely to require changes - and as such are prepared to make additional committements to the stability of that API going forward. Any new functionality will be provided by new interfaces, or otherwise be handled behind the scenes.

This is certainly not the end of Cwtch development. We have big plans for the future including the long-anticipated Hybrid Groups implementation, a light client for restricted mobile operating systems, a return of the bulletin boards overlay, and much more.

We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who helped Cwtch get this far. We could not have done it without you. If you have helped in any way and would like to be listed in the contributor credits please reach out.

A Big Thank You​

On a personal note, as Executive Director of Open Privacy, and lead of the Cwtch project. I want to take this opportunity to thank the Cwtch core team across time: Dan Ballard, Erinn Atwater and Marcia Díaz Agudelo - this work isn’t glamorous, and doesn’t pay well, there is no profit to be made in decentralizing power. A lack of funding means we don't all work together any more, but you all still contribute so much to this project.

It takes a special kind of person to be willing to spend a significant fraction of their lives devoted to working on something for the benefit of other people. Thank you for believing in this mission.

I also want to say thank you to all the people who tested Cwtch over the years and provided invaluable feedback, bug reports and critique. You have made Cwtch what it is today, and I am sure you will be making it even better in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to extend a big thank you to all of the supporters of Open Privacy around the world - without your donations and continued enthusiasm for the work that we do, none of this would be possible.

Download Cwtch 1.13​

You can download Cwtch from https://cwtch.im/download.

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Alternatively we also provide a releases-only RSS feed.

In This Release​

A special thanks to the amazing volunteer translators and testers who made this release possible.

• New Features:
  • Conversation Search - Cwtch can now find messages based on their content.
  • Appear Offline Mode - in this mode Cwtch does not launch a listening service for inbound contacts, and allows a profile to be more selective in the contacts they connect to.
  • Whonix Support - new runtime flags make changes that allow Cwtch to run on Whonix
  • Save History Global Setting - by default Cwtch deletes all messages on shutdown unless a conversation is otherwise configured. This change allows a user to change this default behaviour.
• Bug Fixes / Improvements:
  • Based on Flutter 3.13.4
  • Updated Android Target to 33
  • Profile Status Menu now has many more options, including offline status, edit profile and enabling/disabling profile
  • File Sharing Bug Fixes
    • Manage shared files now supports re-enabling older file shares
  • Improvements towards UI Reproducible Builds
  • Server Info now propagates to the UI consistently
  • Prevent DBus Exceptions on platforms where it is unsupported
  • Packaged Emoji Font
  • Fixes to retry manager which have greater improved (re)connection efficacy
  • Allow deleting server info in Manage Servers
• Accessibility / UX:
  • Core translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Danish , Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian , Romanian , Russian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh
  • Partial translations for Korean (37%), Japanese (27%), , Luxembourgish (20%), Greek (15%), Uzbek (10%), and Portuguese (5%)
  • Font Scaling improvements on several screens

Reproducible Bindings​

Cwtch 1.13 is based on libCwtch version libCwtch-autobindings-2023-09-26-13-15-v0.0.10. The repliqate scripts to reproduce these bindings from source can be found at https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/repliqate-scripts/src/branch/main/cwtch-autobindings-v0.0.10

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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!

Stable Blocker and Timelines​

Back in January we set the ambitious goal of launching a Cwtch Stable in the Summer of 2023. We had planned to finish all of the work prior to the end of August. The vast majority of that work has now been completed - what remains is captured in Stable Blockers project which tracks the current state of work that we have marked as being critical to a Cwtch Stable release.

Despite there being a large number of remaining issues, many of the outstanding work is inter-related, relies on common implementations or are tightly coupled together.

In summary the final few areas of concern are:

• The ability to delete or purge group conversation history. (For historical reasons storing group history was once considered necessary but this is no longer the case. We plan on enabling this feature in the coming weeks)
• Appropriate handling of less common system configurations. Cwtch current emits non-fatal exceptions if certain services are not available e.g. dbus. This is related to former 3rd party code for managing networking and notification.
• A final UI pass. We have designs for better ways to convey certain information and functionality. We would like to implement these prior to a stable release.

Because of this, we have set a goal of labelling a Cwtch Stable Release Candidate by 30th September 2023.

A New Nightly​

There is a new nightly version of Cwtch available for testing (2023-09-06-21-25-v1.12.0-33-g05b1). This version contains a few bug fixes related to file share management, in addition to a significant improvement in the connection management code.

Additionally, thanks to volunteer testers and contributors the installation instructions and packaged configurations for Whonix have been much improved. See running Cwtch on Whonix for more information.

Get Involved​

Staff and volunteer shortages have slightly extended our original estimates. In particular we are bottle-necked on review effort for new code. This is why we would like to encourage people to test out the latest nightlies and report any bugs/issues/improvements.

In order to help people get acclimated to our development flow we have created a new section on the main documentation site called Developing Cwtch - there you will find a collection of useful links and information about how to get started with Cwtch development, what libraries and tools we use, how pull requests are validated and verified, and how to choose an issue to work on.

We also also updated our guides on Translating Cwtch and Testing Cwtch.

If you are interested in getting started with Cwtch development then please check it out, and feel free to reach out to team@cwtch.im (or open an issue) with any questions. All types of contributions are eligible for stickers.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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

Stay up to date!​

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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

Stay up to date!​

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

A History of Cwtch Contibutions and Anonmymity​

In the early days of Cwtch we made the explicit decision to not include credits anywhere in the application, and to accept contributions anonymously over a variety of channels, including Cwtch itself.

Due to the nature of the application, and the privacy and metadata resistant space in general, we have always had a policy of evaluating contributions based on merit, and not on identity. This approach means that, while we do have contributors whose identity is known to us in some way, we have many who we know only by writing style, contribution type, or cwtch address.

We understand that many people much prefer it this way, and have no desire to have any identity linked to the Cwtch project. To those people we offer our deep gratitude. Thank you. You have made Cwtch what it is. (And if you ever want Cwtch Stickers - please let us know!)

However, it would not be right of us to release Cwtch Stable without at least one final offer to all contributors. If you want to be credited for your contributions to Cwtch then, please, reach out to us and let us know of a way to appropriately credit you.

Getting in Touch​

You can ask for credit via email (team@cwtch.im), or via Cwtch (either publicly via the Cwtch Release Candidate Testers groups, or privately in a message to Sarah: icyt7rvdsdci42h6si2ibtwucdmjrlcb2ezkecuagtquiiflbkxf2cqd).

You can also open an issue.

When asking, please provide a name or handle, and if desired, a rough description of the contribution (e.g. development, design, documentation, translating, funding). Anyone who does not provide a description will be grouped under a general thanks section.

This is an open offer. If at any time you change your mind and wish to have credit added (or removed) please let us know.

I want to take another opporunity to say, regardless of whether you wish to be publicly credited for your work on Cwtch, thank you.

Stay up to date!​

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

Building the Cwtch UI​

The official Cwtch UI project uses the FLutter framework. The Cwtch UI deliberately tracks the stable channel.

All builds are conducted through the flutter tool e.g. flutter build. We inject two build flags as part of the official build VERSION and COMMIT_DATE:

flutter build linux --dart-define BUILD_VER=cat VERSION --dart-define BUILD_DATE=cat COMMIT_DATE

These flags are defined to be identical to Cwtch Bindings. VERSION is the latest git tag: git describe --tags --abbrev=1 and COMMIT_DATE is the date of the latest commit on the branch echo `git log -1 --format=%cd --date=format:%G-%m-%d-%H-%M` > COMMIT_DATE

All Cwtch UI builds also depend on two external dependencies not managed directly by the flutter project: Tor (implicit as part of the fetchTor scripts) and libCwtch (defined in LIBCWTCH-GO.version, and fetched via the fetch-libcwtch scripts).

The binaries are downloaded via their respective scripts prior to the build, and managed via a separate update process.

Changes we made for reproducible builds​

For reproducible linux builds we had to modify the generated linux/CMakeLists.txt file to include the following compiler and linker flags:

• -fno-ident - suppresses compiler identifying information from compiled artifacts. Without this small changes in compiler versions will result in different binaries.
• --hash-style=gnu - asserts a standard hashing scheme to use across all compiled artifacts. Without this compilers that have been compiled with different default schemes will produce different artifacts
• --build-id=none - suppresses build id generation. Without this each compiled artifact will have a section of effectively randomized data.

We have also defined a new linker script that differs from the default by removing all .comment sections from object files. We do this because the linking process links in non-project artifacts like crtbeginS.o which, in most systems, us compiled with a .comment section (the default linking script already removes the .note.gnu* sections.

Tar Archives​

Finally, following the guide at reproducible-builds.org we have defined standard metadata for the generated Tar archives to make them also reproducible.

Limitations and Next Steps​

The above changes mean that official linux builds of the same commit will now result in identical artifacts.

The next step is to roll these changes into repliqate as we have done with our bindings builds.

However, because Repliqate is based on Debian images and our official UI builds are based on an Ubuntu distribution the resulting archives differ by a single instruction at the start of a few sections - introduced because Ubuntu compiles and provides C Runtime (CRT) artifacts (e.g. crti.o with full branch protection enabled. On 64-bit systems this results in an endcr64 instruction being inserted at the start of the .init and .fini sections, among others.

In order to allow people to fully repliqate Cwtch builds in an isolated environment like repliqate, as we do for Cwtch Bindings, it will be necessary to provide instructions for setting up a hardened image that can work the same way in repliqate.

Pinned Dependencies​

Additionally, while our repliqate scripts pin several major dependencies like flutter and go, and the dependencies managed by these systems are locked to specific versions, there are still a few dependencies within the ecosystems that are not strictly pinned.

The major one is libc. Operating systems rarely make big changes to packaged libc versions for a specific distribution (typically because doing so in a non-breaking way would be a major undertaking).

However this does mean that Cwtch reproduciblility is implicitly tied to operating system practices - this is something we would like to begin decoupling ourselves from going forward.

Stay up to date!​

We expect to make additional progress on this in the coming weeks and months. Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

Update on the Cwtch Stable Roadmap​

Back in March we extended and updated several goals from our January roadmap that we would have to hit on our way to Cwtch Stable, and the timelines for achieving them. Now that we have reached target date of many of these goals, we can look back and see how work is progressing.

(✅ means complete, 🟡 means in-progress, 🕒 reprioritized)

• By 30th April 2023 the Cwtch team will have written the remaining outstanding documentation from the January roadmap including:
  • A Cwtch Release Process Document ✅ - Release Process
  • A Cwtch Packaging Document ✅ - Packaging Documentation
  • Completion of documentation of existing Cwtch features, including relevant screenshots. 🟡 - new features are documented to the standards outlined in new documentation style guide, and many older feature documentation features have been updated to that standard. Work is ongoing to refine the standard.
• By 30th April 2023 the Cwtch team will have also released developer-centric documentation including:
  • A guide to building Cwtch-apps using official libraries ✅ - Building a Cwtch App
  • Automatically generated API documentation for libCwtch 🕒 - this effort has been delayed pending other higher priority work.
• By 30th June 2023 the Cwtch team will have released new Cwtch Beta releases (1.12+) featuring:
  • An implementation of Conversation Search 🟡 - currently in active development
  • Profile statuses and other associated information ✅ - released in Cwtch Beta 1.12
  • An update to the network handling code to allow for better Protocol Engine management 🟡🕒 - new Network Management code was released in Cwtch Beta 1.12. We now believe these changes will be complete in Cwtch Beta 1.13.
• By 31st July 2023 the Cwtch team will have completed several infrastructure upgrades including:
  • Extended reproducible builds to cover the Cwtch UI, or document where the blockers to achieving this exist. 🟡 - we have recently made a few updates to Repliqate to support this work, and expect to begin in-depth examination of build artifacts in the next couple of weeks.
  • Integration of automated fuzzing into the build pipeline for all Cwtch dependencies maintained by the Cwtch team 🕒 - after some initial explorations into new Go fuzzing tools we reached the conclusion that it would be better to replace this effort with other assurance work (see below).
  • New testing environments for F-droid, Whonix, Raspberry Pi and other partially supported systems 🟡 - we have already launched an environment for testing Tails. Other platforms are underway.
• By 31st August 2023 the Cwtch team will have a released Cwtch Stable Release Candidate:
  • At this point we expect that the Cwtch application and existing documentation will be robust and complete enough to be labeled as stable.
  • Along with this label comes a higher standard for how we consider all aspects of Cwtch development. The work we have done up to this point reflects a much stronger development pipeline, and an ongoing commitment to security.
  • This does not mark an end to Cwtch development, or new Cwtch features. But it does denote the point at which we consider Cwtch to be appropriate for wider use.

Next Steps, Refinements, Additional Work​

As you may have noticed above we have reprioritized some work after initial investigations forced us to reevaluate the expected cost/benefit trade-off. This has allowed us to move up timelines for tasks e.g. reproducible UI builds and testing environments.

Other work has been reprioritized due to developer availability. Documentation work in particular has not progressed as fast as we would like.

However, Cwtch Beta 1.12 featured many new features alongside improved performance, more robust packaging, and several fixes impacting experimental features like file sharing.

The work that we have done on reproducible and automatically generated bindings has considerably reduced the maintenance burden associated with updates and adding new features, and has allowed us to also tackle long standing issues related to Tor process managements and Cwtch startup.

We are still on track for releasing a Cwtch Stable release candidate in August 2023, with an official Cwtch Stable release expected shortly afterwards.

This is not all we have planned for the upcoming months. Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Get Involved​

We have noticed an uptick in the number of people reaching out interested in contributing to Cwtch development. In order to help people get acclimated to our development flow we have created a new section on the main documentation site called Developing Cwtch - there you will find a collection of useful links and information about how to get started with Cwtch development, what libraries and tools we use, how pull requests are validated and verified, and how to choose an issue to work on.

We also also updated our guides on Translating Cwtch and Testing Cwtch.

If you are interested in getting started with Cwtch development then please check it out, and feel free to reach out to team@cwtch.im (or open an issue) with any questions. All types of contributions are eligible for stickers.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

In This Release​

A special thanks to the amazing volunteer translators and testers who made this release possible.

• New Features:
  • Profile Attributes - profiles can now be augmented with additional public information
  • Availability Status - you can now notify contacts that you are away or busy
  • Five New Supported Localizations: Japanese, Korean, Slovak, Swahili and Swedish
  • Support for Tails - adds an OnionGrater configuration and a new CWTCH_TAILS environment variable that enables special Tor behaviour.
• Bug Fixes / Improvements:
  • Based on Flutter 3.10
  • Inter is now the main UI font
  • New Font Scaling setting
  • New Network Management code to better manage Tor on unstable networks
  • File Sharing Experiment Fixes
    • Fix performance issues for file bubble
    • Allow restarting of file shares that have timed out
    • Fix NPE in FileBubble caused by deleting the underlying file
    • Move from RetVal to UpdateConversationAttributes to minimze UI thread issues
  • Updates to Linux install scripts to support more distributions
  • Add a Retry Peer connection to prioritize connection attempts for certain conversations
  • Updates to _FlDartProject to allow custom setting of Flutter asset paths
• Accessibility / UX:
  • Full translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, and Welsh
  • Core translations for Danish (75%), Norwegian (76%), and Romanian (75%)
  • Partial translations for Japanese (29%), Korean (23%), Luxembourgish (22%), Greek (16%), and Portuguese (6%)

Reproducible Bindings​

Cwtch 1.12 is based on libCwtch version libCwtch-autobindings-2023-06-13-10-50-v0.0.5. The repliqate scripts to reproduce these bindings from source can be found at https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/repliqate-scripts/src/branch/main/cwtch-autobindings-v0.0.5

Download the New Version​

You can download Cwtch from https://cwtch.im/download.

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Alternatively we also provide a releases-only RSS feed.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

New Nightly​

There is a new Nightly build are available from our build server. The latest nightly we recommend testing is 2023-06-05-17-36-v1.11.0-74-g0406.

This version has a large number of improvements and bug fixes including:

• A new Font Scaling setting
• Several networking and connection management improvements including automatic detection and response to network changes, and several bug fixes that impacted time-to-connection after a resetting Tor.
• Updated UI font styles
• Dependency updates, including a new base of Flutter 3.10.
• A fix for stuck file downloading notifications on Android
• A fix for missing profile images in certain edge cases on Android
• Japanese, Swedish, and Swahili translation options
• A new retry peer connection button for prompting Cwtch to prioritize specific connections
• Tails support

In addition, this nightly also includes a number of performance improvements that should fix reported rendering issues on less powerful devices.

Please see the contribution documentation for advice on submitting feedback

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

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.

Cwtch Development Handbook​

We have created a new documentation section, the developers handbook. This new section is targeted towards to people working on Cwtch projects (e.g. the official Cwtch library or the Cwtch UI), as well as people who want to build new Cwtch applications (e.g. chat bots or custom clients).

Release and Packaging Process​

The new handbook features a breakdown of Cwtch release processes - describing what, and how, build artifacts are created; the difference between nightly and official builds; how the official release process works; and how reproducible build scripts are created.

Cwtch Application Development and Cwtchbot v0.1.0!​

For the first time ever we now have comprehensive documentation on how to build a Cwtch Application. This section of the development handbook covers everything from choosing a Cwtch library, to building your first application.

Together with this new documentation we have also released version 0.1 of the Cwtchbot framework, updating calls to use the new Cwtch Stable API.

New Nightly​

There is a new Nightly build are available from our build server. The latest nightly we recommend testing is 2023-04-26-20-57-v1.11.0-33-gb4371.

This version has a number of fixes and updates to the file sharing and image previews/profile pictures experiment, and an update to the in-development Tails support.

In addition, this nightly also includes a number of performance improvements that should fix reported rendering issues on less powerful devices.

Please see the contribution documentation for advice on submitting feedback

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

Additionally, we have also published draft guidance on running Cwtch on Tails that we would like volunteers to test and report back on.

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.

Availability Status​

New in this nightly is the ability to notify your conversations that you are "Away" or "Busy".

Read more: Availability Status

Profile Attributes​

Also new is the ability to augment your profile with a few small pieces of public information.

Read more: Profile Information

Downloading the Nightly​

Nightly builds are available from our build server. Download links for 2023-04-05-18-28-v1.11.0-7-g0290 are available below.

• Windows: https://build.openprivacy.ca/files/flwtch-win-2023-04-05-18-28-v1.11.0-7-g0290/
• Linux: https://build.openprivacy.ca/files/flwtch-2023-04-05-18-27-v1.11.0-7-g0290/
• Mac: https://build.openprivacy.ca/files/flwtch-macos-2023-04-05-14-27-v1.11.0-7-g0290/
• Android: https://build.openprivacy.ca/files/flwtch-2023-04-05-18-27-v1.11.0-7-g0290/

Please see the contribution documentation for advice on submitting feedback

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

This post revisits the Cwtch Stable roadmap we introduced at the start of the year, and provides an overview of the next steps on our journey towards Cwtch Stable.

Update on the January Roadmap​

Back in January we outlined several goals that we would have to hit on our way to Cwtch Stable, and the timelines for achieving them. Now that we have reached target date of the last of these goals, we can look back and see how we did:

(✅ means complete, 🟡 means in-progress, ❌ not started.)

• By 1st February 2023, the Cwtch team will have reviewed all existing Cwtch issues in line with this document, and established a timeline for including them in upcoming releases (or specifically commit to not including them in upcoming releases). ✅
• By 1st February 2023, the Cwtch team will have finalized a feature set that defines Cwtch Stable and established a timeline for including these features in upcoming Cwtch Beta releases. ✅
• By 1st February 2023, the Cwtch team will have expanded the Cwtch Documentation website to include a section for:
  • Security and Design Documents ✅
  • Infrastructure and Support 🟡
  • in addition to a new development blog. ✅
• By 31st March 2023, the Cwtch team will have created:
  • a style guide for documentation, and ✅
  • have used it to ensure that all Cwtch features have consistent documentation available, 🟡
  • with at least one screenshot (where applicable). 🟡
• By 31st March 2023 the Cwtch team will have published:
  • a Cwtch Interface Specification Document ✅
  • a Cwtch Release Process Document 🟡
  • a Cwtch Support Plan document ✅
  • a Cwtch Packaging Document 🟡
  • a document describing the Reproducible Builds Process ✅
  • These documents will be available on the newly expanded Cwtch Documentation website 🟡
• By 31st March 2023 the Cwtch team will have integrated automated UI tests into the build pipeline for the cwtch-ui repository. ✅
• By 31st March 2023 the Cwtch team will have integrated automated fuzzing into the build pipeline for all Cwtch dependencies maintained by the Cwtch team ❌
• By 31st March 2023 the Cwtch team will have committed to a date, timeline, and roadmap for launching Cwtch Stable ✅ (this post!)

While we didn't hit all of our goals, we did make progress on nearly all of them, and in addition also made progress in a few other key areas:

• Cwtch Autobindings with compile-time optional experiments
• Cwtch 1.11 - with support for reproducible bindings, two new localizations (Slovak and Korean), in addition to a myriad of bug fixes and performance improvements.
• Repliqate - a tool for testing and confirming reproducible builds processes based on Qemu, and a Debian Cloud image.

A Timeline for Cwtch Stable​

Now for the big news, we plan on releasing a candidate Cwtch Stable release during Summer 2023. Here is our plan for getting there:

• By 30th April 2023 the Cwtch team will have written the remaining outstanding documentation from the January roadmap including:
  • A Cwtch Release Process Document
  • A Cwtch Packaging Document
  • Completion of documentation of existing Cwtch features, including relevant screenshots.
• By 30th April 2023 the Cwtch team will have also released developer-centric documentation including:
  • A guide to building Cwtch-apps using official libraries
  • Automatically generated API documentation for libCwtch
• By 30th June 2023 the Cwtch team will have released new Cwtch Beta releases (1.12+) featuring:
  • An implementation of Conversation Search
  • Profile statuses and other associated information
  • An update to the network handling code to allow for better Protocol Engine management
• By 31st July 2023 the Cwtch team will have completed several infrastructure upgrades including:
  • Extended reproducible builds to cover the Cwtch UI, or document where the blockers to achieving this exist.
  • Integration of automated fuzzing into the build pipeline for all Cwtch dependencies maintained by the Cwtch team
  • New testing environments for F-droid, Whonix, Raspberry Pi and other partially supported systems
• By 31st August 2023 the Cwtch team will have a released Cwtch Stable Release Candidate:
  • At this point we expect that the Cwtch application and existing documentation will be robust and complete enough to be labelled as stable.
  • Along with this label comes a higher standard for how we consider all aspects of Cwtch development. The work we have done up to this point reflects a much stronger development pipeline, and an ongoing commitment to security.
  • This does not mark an end to Cwtch development, or new Cwtch features. But it does denote the point at which we consider Cwtch to be appropriate for wider use.

This is not all we have planned for the upcoming months. Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Get Involved​

We have noticed an uptick in the number of people reaching out interested in contributing to Cwtch development. In order to help people get acclimated to our development flow we have created a new section on the main documentation site called Developing Cwtch - there you will find a collection of useful links and information about how to get started with Cwtch development, what libraries and tools we use, how pull requests are validated and verified, and how to choose an issue to work on.

We also also updated our guides on Translating Cwtch and Testing Cwtch.

If you are interested in getting started with Cwtch development then please check it out, and feel free to reach out to team@cwtch.im (or open an issue) with any questions. All types of contributions are eligible for stickers.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

Cwtch 1.11 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 reproducible and automatically generated bindings, as well as support for two new languages (Slovak and Korean), in addition to several performance improvements and bug fixes.

In This Release​

A special thanks to the amazing volunteer translators and testers who made this release possible.

• New Features:
  • Based on new Reproducible Cwtch Stable Autobuilds - this is the first release of cwtch based on reproducible Cwtch bindings in addition to our new automatically generated
  • Two New Supported Localizations: Slovak and Korean
• Bug Fixes / Improvements:
  • When preserving a message draft, quoted messages are now also saved
  • Layout issues caused by pathological unicode are now prevented
  • Improved performance of message row rendering
  • Clickable Links: Links in replies are now selectable
  • Clickable Links: Fixed error when highlighting certain URIs
  • File Downloading: Fixes for file downloading and exporting on 32bit Android devices
  • Server Hosting: Fixes for several layout issues
  • Build pipeline now runs automated UI tests
  • Fix issues caused by scrollbar controller overriding
  • Initial support for the Blodeuwedd Assistant (currently compile-time disabled)
  • Cwtch Library:
    • New Stable Cwtch Peer API
    • Ported File Downloading and Image Previews experiments into Cwtch
• Accessibility / UX:
  • Full translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, and Welsh
  • Core translations for Danish (75%), Norwegian (76%), and Romanian (75%)
  • Partial translations for Luxembourgish (22%), Greek (16%), and Portuguese (6%)

Reproducible Bindings​

Cwtch 1.11 is based on libCwtch version 2023-03-16-15-07-v0.0.3-1-g50c853a. The repliqate scripts to reproduce these bindings from source can be found at https://git.openprivacy.ca/cwtch.im/repliqate-scripts/src/branch/main/cwtch-autobindings-v0.0.3-1-g50c853a

Download the New Version​

You can download Cwtch from https://cwtch.im/download.

Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Alternatively we also provide a releases-only RSS feed.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.

Cwtch Secure Development Handbook​

One of the earliest compendiums of Cwtch documentation was the Cwtch Secure Development Handbook. This handbook provided an overview of the various parts of the Cwtch ecosystem, the known risks, and any existing mitigations. The handbook was designed to serve as a guide to developers who were building or extending Cwtch, and over the years it also served as a permanent home for documenting long-standing design decisions.

We have now ported the the handbook to this documentation site, along with updating some of the contents. Over the next few months we will be expanding this section to include new sections on fuzzing, plugins, and client implementation.

Volunteer Development​

We have noticed an uptick in the number of people reaching out interested in contributing to Cwtch development. In order to help people get acclimated to our development flow we have created a new section on the main documentation site called Developing Cwtch - there you will find a collection of useful links and information about how to get started with Cwtch development, what libraries and tools we use, how pull requests are validated and verified, and how to choose an issue to work on.

We also also updated our guides on Translating Cwtch and Testing Cwtch.

If you are interested in getting started with Cwtch development then please check it out, and feel free to reach out to team@cwtch.im (or open an issue) with any questions. All types of contributions are eligible for stickers.

Next Steps​

We still have more work to do on the documentation front:

• Ensuring all pages implement the new documentation style guide, and include appropriate screenshots and descriptions.
• Expanding the security handbook to provide information on reproducible builds, the new Cwtch Stable API and upcoming improvements around fuzz testing.
• Creating new documentation sections on the libCwtch autobindings API and building applications on top of Cwtch.

As these changes are made, and these goals met we will be posting about them here! Subscribe to our RSS feed, Atom feed, or JSON feed to stay up to date, and get the latest on, all aspects of Cwtch development.

Help us go further!​

We couldn't do what we do without all the wonderful community support we get, from one-off donations to recurring support via Patreon.

If you want to see us move faster on some of these goals and are in a position to, please donate. If you happen to be at a company that wants to do more for the community and this aligns, please consider donating or sponsoring a developer.

Donations of $5 or more can opt to receive stickers as a thank-you gift!

For more information about donating to Open Privacy and claiming a thank you gift please visit the Open Privacy Donate page.