Whisperfish
The new Whisperfish 0.6 is getting functional. Whisperfish should be in a usable state for many users; make sure to have the latest version! Also, check our Wiki and feel free to contribute to it! Currently, mimimum supported SailfishOS version is 3.3. We intend to keep compatibility with 3.4 for as long as humanly possible.
What to expect
If you had a pre-existing, working 0.5 installation with default settings, migration should be a breeze. Notably not working:
- Creating groups (planned for beta.1)
- GroupsV2 ("private groups", created after 14 Oct 2020) messages (planned for beta.1). If you have a private group on Android or iOS, please do not yet migrate!
- Session reset and identity reset in Whisperfish (planned for beta.1)
- Linking with Signal Desktop (planned for beta.1)
Additionally, the Sailfish 4.0 series introduced a few issues, and possibly new features; notably:
- Registration on SailfishOS 4.0.1.45 EA. The rendering of a reCAPTCHA does not work in any of the available webviews. This will be fixed in the next SailfishOS release. Meanwhile, use this patch which will be offered to you as an update after enabling this OpenRepos repository. Install the update and then register. Do not install it on 3.4, there's no need. If it still doesn't work, run zypper ref ; zypper dup -r openrepos-rubdos on the command line as root and accept the update of the three webview packages.
Contribute: get in touch, report issues and translate!
If the app behaves strangely or slow (I have a strong dislike for slow software) to you, please get in touch on Matrix #whisperfish:rubdos.be or on Freenode #whisperfish, file an issue, or send an email to whisperfish [at] rubdos [dot] be, or post on the SailfishOS Forum topic. If it works well already, alse let me know! That's good for morale.
Development and progress
Follow the progress of the rework in the 0.6 milestone on Gitlab. If you are interested in contributing, contact me on Gitlab. If you want to discuss development, join the discussion on Matrix #whisperfish:rubdos.be.
There are nightly builds (in form of RPM) available on Gitlab. Nighlies eat batteries for breakfast, break up with your girlfriend, and use magic to turn phones into bricks. If you want to use them, please come and chat on Matrix or IRC. Whenever there is a version that makes sense, and has a low probability of tearing apart the very fabric of the universe, it'll be here on Open Repos!
Donations
Thanks for the support, feel free to buy me a coffee! Liberapay allows for donations via PayPal or credit card. While I do appreciate the donations, please consider matching your donation towards Signal themselves. They need it more than I do, now more than ever! Also consider donating to Weblate, because they provide their translation hosting service to us and many other SailfishOS applications at no cost!
License note
The original Whisperfish 0.5.0, by Andrew, was released under GPLv3+. Since we are using the upstream code of Signal themselves, partly licensed under AGPLv3+, the whole of Whisperfish 0.6.0 falls under AGPLv3+.
Screenshots:
Category:
Application versions:
Changelog:
Whisperfish 1.0.0 (planned)
The milestone on GitLab for this release
Many big plans!
- The Big Refactoring, including cleanup of spaghetti, building with the official SDK, ...
- Registration as a secondary device, if you prefer running the official Android Signal app as main device.
Whisperfish 0.6.0 (planned)
The milestone on Gitlab for this release
- Feature parity with, and modernized version of Whisperfish 0.5.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.1 (planned)
The milestone on Gitlab for this release
Features
- Creating and managing groups
- GroupsV2 compatibility
- Complete migration to UUID-based sessions.
- Device linking (Signal Desktop)
- Register without storage password, thanks to Gabriel Margiani!
- Slight cleanup of the registration page, thanks to ntninja!
- HUGE overhaul of the UI, thanks to Mirian Margiani! You won't recognise Whisperfish anymore. Pinky promise.
- Setup for all the new Signal features: quotes, multiple attachments, stickers/gifs, ...
- New video and image pages.
- Linking/saving contacts from the UI
- Emoji pack support, check our wiki for installation.
- Clean-up of the group view page, in part thanks to Thomas Michel!
- Simple daemon functionality, thanks to Gabriel Margiani!
- Link-time optimization: 20% smaller RPMs and executables
- Option to minimize notifications, useful in e.g. busy groups, thanks to flypig.
Translations
- We have a Weblate account now!
- Portuguese translation, thanks to Yield and Antonio Maretzek!
- Czech translation, thanks to PawelSpoon!
- Turkish translation, thanks to Oğuz Ersen!
- Nowegian translation, thanks to Allan Nordhøy!
- Many, many, many, MANY cleanup operations on Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, thanks to Nathan, Dryo, and J. Lavoie!
Fixes
- More stable reconnection management. Flight mode and network changes should now work as expected.
- Access contacts through the Nemo QML interface instead of raw contacts.db. This interface will probably be more stable than the raw SQLite, and keeps compatibility across 3.x and 4.x.
- A "privileged file" allows us to read contact lists again on SailfishOS 4.0
- More or less fixed video playback
- Fix lingering notifications on session activation, thanks to flypig!
- JPEG rotation is now correct in Whisperfish (but not yet on Android), thanks to Mirian Margiani.
- Image zoom is more intuitive for images that are almost the same size as the screen, thanks to Mirian Margiani.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.9
Fixes startup on upgraded contact database.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.8
Features/fixes
- Captcha filing at registration time, thanks to Gabriel Margiani! Seriously, this was a huge undertaking.
- Sailfish 4.0.45 compatibility, except for registration (#229, bug report on forum).
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.7
Features
- Reactions show up as "R@number:EMOJI", instead of empty balloons. Thanks to Markus for this!
- Multiple password attempts! Thanks to Igon Makarov
Fixes
- Create the correct attachments download directory, should fix attachments downloading for new installations.
- Some phone numbers (notably with dashes, parantheses or dots) did not show up with names.
- New members in a group show up, group renames come through.
- Group members show up as names, not phone numbers, thanks to Thomas Michel.
- Fixes copying message to clipboard, thanks to Thomas Michel.
- Auto-focus password field, thanks to Markus.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.6
Features
- The conversation page got a complete overhaul in design. I hope you like it.
Fixes
- Fix a race condition during registration, which may corrupt the settings file.
- Sent messages update the session view
- More names show up correctly in session view (please file an issue if it's still buggy!)
- Session sections
- Sent attachments show up as thumbnails
- Some translation work in the (currently disfunctional) Device List page
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.5
Features
- Sending new messages to a single contact, clean-up of contact selection
- Started French language translation
- French translation finished (thanks Thibaut Vandervelden)
- Spanish translation got a lot of clean-up (thanks carlosgonz)
- Settings page looks a lot nicer
Fixes
- Settings page revamped, looks a lot cleaner
- attachment_dir was not set on settings init.
- Contact DB fix for non-nemo users (new 3.4 installs, alternate users)
- Show build ID in about screen
- Notifications with vibration and sound
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.4
The milestone on Gitlab for this release
Features:
- Sending attachments
- Registration via voice and text
- Connection status feedback
- Aarch64 version
Under the hood:
- Partial support new UUID-based identifiers
- Initial tooling for future database migrations
- Pre-key refreshing
- Attachment failure log (set attachment_log=true in harbour-whisperfish.conf)
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.3
The milestone on Gitlab for this release
- Sending direct and group messages, notably no attachments.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.2
The milestone on Gitlab for this release
- Receiving messages and their attachments
Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.1
The milestone on Gitlab for this release
- Move the base code over to Rust, for easy linking to libsignal-protocol-c.
I made a write-up about Qt, Sailfish and event loops on my blog. - Implement most of the GUI and bind to the database (thank you, Markus, for all the work!)
Comments
rossholmes
Mon, 2021/04/19 - 14:33
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Hi there, I got stuck during the registration process as when I get to Captcha part the page stays white blank - there is a little circle for few seconds and after it says Cannot load Captcha, check internet connection. Is there a workaround?
rubdos
Mon, 2021/04/19 - 15:30
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Workaround is documented here: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/4-0-1-45-regression-in-rendering-of-recap...
This is a bug in SailfishOS 4.0, and will be fixed in SailfishOS 4.1.
rossholmes
Mon, 2021/04/19 - 15:44
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Thank you so much! Love your work
rubdos
Mon, 2021/04/19 - 15:47
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Glad I can help! Next release should be soon™ :-)
TMavica
Mon, 2021/04/19 - 09:17
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aarch64
rubdos
Mon, 2021/04/19 - 12:07
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It's there, it's always been there.
TMavica
Wed, 2021/03/31 - 10:08
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I want a 64 bit build
rubdos
Wed, 2021/03/31 - 10:42
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There is an aarch64 build, if that's what you mean. I haven't tested it (no device with aarch64 SailfishOS), but it should work. Or do you mean an x86_64/amd64 build?
yomark
Sat, 2021/03/20 - 11:49
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x2, tnx rubdos!
dalas_revo
Thu, 2021/03/18 - 20:59
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Hi @rubdos, thanks a lot for this app! Unfortunately I have a problem: it won't start, I see the spinning circle and then it closes again. When starting from terminal, I see:
I am on a freshly installed XA2 on SFOS 4.0.1.48.
rubdos
Fri, 2021/03/19 - 01:02
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Owkay, I just tried to do the backport of the relevant patches, but it's a mess to back port. Beta.1 will include a totally new GUI and a big refactor of the backend, so it's non-trivial conflicts a volonté here.
I'll prepare a version alpha.9 that ignores the error instead, such that WF will start again. I'm spending a lot of time getting beta.1 in shape, it'll be awesome!
dalas_revo
Fri, 2021/03/19 - 10:10
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Thanks for your hard work on this issue and on the app!
rubdos
Thu, 2021/03/18 - 21:45
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Thanks for reporting, I'll try to fix that tomorrow in a new alpha.9. I didn't realize that I had not included the contact fixes in alpha.8. That probably means that practically nobody can use Whisperfish on 4.0.1.48, but you're the first to report. Pretty curious.
nerd7473
Wed, 2021/03/10 - 18:46
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Will we get videocalls eventually?
rubdos
Wed, 2021/03/10 - 21:36
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Very very eventually, I hope to implement that indeed :-)
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 23:11
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noax8 ....I cant join
rubdos
Fri, 2021/02/26 - 10:54
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I've sent you an invite, hope that's better now :)
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 15:36
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I cant find the room in matrix using Elements
rubdos
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 21:39
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By the way, if you still want to join, try to type /join #whisperfish:rubdos.be in any chat. Otherwise, let me know your Matrix username and I'll invite you!
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 15:24
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I have just send it in gitlab. I dont if thats tge best way for you,
rubdos
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 15:53
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Yes, let's continue this on Gitlab, that's perfect :-)
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 15:03
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Also if I try to open, holfing the message I cab open or delete. If I push open , the app failed.
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 14:58
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And I can even heard the audios
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 14:57
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Where should I send it to you?
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 12:31
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Hej rubdos. Been in koli 4 I cant read or see pictures that people is sending to me. I receive them, but cant open them.
rubdos
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 13:22
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Did this work before? Do their thumbnails show up? Please show me the contents of `.config/harbour-whisperfish/harbour-whisperfish.conf`, e.g. by running `cat .config/harbour-whisperfish/harbour-whisperfish.conf | grep attachment`. I think I know what bug this is; if I'm right this will be solved in the next release, but I'll walk you through getting it fixed already.
konst
Thu, 2021/02/25 - 10:30
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Hello! The app doesn't start. Freshly installed SFOS on XA2, 4.0.1.48.
When I tap on the icon, it moves in the screen with other running apps, then disappears in ~5 seconds
inte
Thu, 2021/02/18 - 01:54
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Is it just me or are conatcts not syncing any more in 4.0.1.48? And, by the way, the contact name shown previously appears to be the name stored in the nickname field which is not optimal since messenger id is stored in this field by the system when using the built in chat function??
rubdos
Thu, 2021/02/18 - 13:49
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Definitely not just you. It's in the description:
This is fixed in the master branch. Maybe I should branch out *yet another* alpha, now that 4.0 is actually released...
edp17
Fri, 2021/02/12 - 15:49
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Hello,
Thank you for working on native a Signal client.
The previous ones worked fine but the latest version on my Note4 port (SFOS 4.0.1.45) doesn't work. When I hit the Register button, I only get a white screen, then little later it displays a message at the top: "Could not connect to the reCAPTCHA service. Please check your internet connection and reload to get a reCAPTCHA challenge."
The internet (wifi) is on as I just installed the app and there is no way to reload the page. There is some log here: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/XYw92dYNKv/
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