Whisperfish
Whisperfish is an advanced but unofficial Signal client. Whisperfish should be in a usable state for many users, but is still considered beta quality software; make sure to always have the latest version! Also, check our Wiki and feel free to contribute to it! Currently, mimimum supported SailfishOS version is 3.4. We intend to keep compatibility with 3.3 for as long as humanly possible. The build for SailfishOS 3.x is located in a separate OpenRepos application.
Do not ever contact the Signal developers about a Whisperfish issue. You will annoy them and make them dislike us. Contact us instead (see below).
Known issues and implemented features
Lot's of stuff should work. Check the forum for an up-to-date known issues list.
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 Libera.Chat #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!
Licence 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 (th
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
Features
- Feature parity with, and modernized version of Whisperfish 0.5.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.15
Overhauls the QML binding system. This should fix all UI inconsistencies, except for a few that are now introduced.
Changes
- Capture panics to log
- Log Qt errors to Rust
- Allow capturing logs to a file via a configuration option
- Cleaner display of reactions
- Show message action buttons on one row in landscape mode
- Add a placeholder for sticker messages, instead of showing "This message is empty"
- Use upsert clauses thanks to SQLite and Diesel update (slight performance win and code cleanup)
- Remove defunct incognito mode
- Fix displaying version in About menu
- Allow opening direct message from group member list
- Refactor QML session/message singletons (performance win, future proofing, and UI consistency)
- Allow registration with reCAPTCHA and hCAPTCHA
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.14
Bugfix release for most of the bugs we introduced in beta.13, and some fixes for changes upstream.
Changes
- Attempt to handle HTTP 428 by responding with a reCAPTCHA challenge
- Handle device mismatches (fixes sending to contacts that change their linking setup)
- Attempt at fixing a crash at startup related to profile uploading
- Fix a crash when opening an empty session
- emoji.js now supports out-of-date emoji packages as fallback
- Fix typing notification display of names in certain conditions
- Marking as read fix for mismatched sessions
- Cleaner formatting for linked device display
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.13
Profile fetching and updating, avatar displaying, sender key and unidentified sender support at receiver side, and much more.
Changes
- Disable defunct "send new message" functionality
- Don't crash when Signal desktop sends a SyncMessage about a story.
- Use move_rows instead of reinserting upon new message reception
- Big refactoring work by Lucien XU
- Send messages via the Websocket instead of the PushService
- Display avatars
- Display Signal profile names, with preference for local contact names in settings
- Implement displaying and sending quotes
- Use Emoji font for displaying reactions when configured as such
- Move (signed) prekeys, identities, sessions into database
- Implement sender keys and unidentified sending at the receiver side for much improved privacy
- Many, many, other tiny and big things.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.12
Hotfix release for the new Signal root certificate
Changes
- Update root CA certificate for Signal production server (4096 bits RSA instead of 2048!)
- Multiple fixes for SailfishOS 3.4
- Fix storage migration corner case
- Fix some registration issues
- Fix cover scrolling behaviour
- Big update of libsignal-protocol version
- Misc layout and input field improvements
- Refactored some storage and Sailfish platform code
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.11
Mostly bugfixes for bugs that we introduced in beta.10, but also implements Whisperfish as secondary device. This release is basically completely due to direc85 and Gabriel Margiani; thank you both!
Changes
- Add `sailfish-qml` to dependencies for registration to work on new installs (thanks to direc85!)
- Fix config.yml migration code (thanks to direc85!)
- Improve handling SMS verification field input (#444 and #443, thanks to direc85!)
- Implement secondary device mode (thanks to Gabriel Margiani and ntninja!)
- Fix background mode (thanks to Gabriel Margiani and direc85!)
- Start a Catalan translation (thanks to Jaume Singlavalls!)
- Play a quiet message when a message arrives when the application is active (thanks to direc85)
- Fix sending to UUID-only contacts (thanks to Gabriel Margiani, fixed in an unrelated MR)
- Keep up with technical debt (several merge requests and pushes)
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.10 (code sprint edition!)
Many quality-of-life updates and technical debt fixes, thanks to the code sprint of Matti and Ruben!
Changes
- Update to Emoji 14 (thanks to direc85)
- Correct attachment showing for out-of-order downloads
- Allow resetting identity key through developer options
- Cover page design showing messages showing typing indicators (in cooperation with direc85)
- Implement typing indicators for groups and direct messages (turn on in settings)
- Implement captcha rendering through external application, and hence fix registration (thanks to direc85)
- Spit share plugin and compile them separately for Sailfish 3 or 4 (thanks to direc85)
- Fix message queuing and resending
- Migrate session records and identity storage to database
- Update libsignal-client (long overdue, cooperation with Gabriel Féron)
- Redesign registration page to combat phone number entry confusion (thanks to direc85)
- Work around Signal-Desktop issue with JPEG's sent as PNG's (thanks to direc85)
- Optimize Emoji rendering (thanks to direc85 and Mirian Margiani)
- Add RemovableMedia to privileges for sending Pictures from the SD card
- Implement archiving and pinning of sessions (thanks to direc85)
- Multiple UI fixes (thanks to direc85)
- Allow sending pictures directly from within Whisperfish (thanks to direc85)
- Give a warning for old Whisperfish versions (thanks to direc85)
- Show multiple attachments up to five
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.9
Fixes for stuff in beta.8, mostly.
Changes
- Fix for emoji reaction parsing that could cause a crash
- Fix a crash when manually refreshing a group
- Fix config file location after the Sailjail implementation
- Fix creating debug symbols in CI and offline, run LTO on CI. Debug symbols are now hosted alongside nightl RPMs (and probably also here, let's see how the CD copes)
- Add new config paths to MyBackup paths
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.8
A bunch of quality-of-life updates, and SailfishOS 4.4 compatibilty! Direc85 did a lot of work in this release. If you consider donating to me for Whisperfish, please also consider buying direc85 a coffee.
Changes
- Display reaction emoji correctly
- Compute and show safety numbers.
- Collection of small UI improvements, thanks to direc85
- Upscale colored images
- Use the largest size icon everywhere (crispier UI)
- Install all the harbour-whisperfish.png icon sizes (launcher icon always looks the best)
- Disable click-message-to-reply signal until implemented (less accidental visual noise)
- Increase the cover page icon size a bit (looks a little less empty)
- Remove notification on Whisperfish when message has been read on a linked device, thanks to direc85
- Show your own phone number as "Note to Self", with a note icon, thanks to direc85.
- Implement "Reset secure session"
- Lots of background and backend updates for a bit more stability
- Implement muting a session, thanks to direc85
- Implement SailJail in SailfishOS 4.4
- Implement showing emoji reactions
- Implement a captcha workaround
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.7
Edition "omg OpenSSL".
Changes
- Device linking scheme sgnl:// is now supported, allows to link secondary devices again.
- Restructured storage crypto code (thanks to Mutluler!)
- Begin of the Basque translation (thanks to Sergio Varela)
- Fix notification icon and adds multiple resolution icons (thanks to Matti Viljanen/direc85)
- Start using the SailfishOS SDK instead of the hacked-together RubdosSDK. This paves the path to supporting multiple other operating systems and possibly a Linux desktop client. Proof of concept Ubuntu-Touch version exists (thanks Tim and the Axolotl hackers!)
- Separate builds for SailfishOS 3-series and SailfishOS 4-series available on OpenRepos, which solves the incompatibility with SailfishOS 4.3's lack of OpenSSL 1.0. Storeman/zypper should automatically select the correct version for your operating system.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.6
Edition "invert the event loop". Write-up here: https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs/issues/102#issuecomment-919798690
Features
- GUI performance improvement (thanks to the event loop inversion)
- Load time improvement through more database indexing (thanks to Matti Viljanen)
- Add "refresh group" option for stubborn groups.
Fixes
- SailfishOS 4.2 compatibility (thanks to the event loop inversion)
- Order messages by date instead of by id (thanks to Matti Viljanen)
- Fix message and session deletion (thanks to Matti Viljanen
- Fix notifications on SailfishOS 3.x (thanks to Matti Viljanen)
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.5
Fixes
- Reception of messages with attachments, but without accompanying text
- Show contact/payment/deletion/group call update messages as "unimplemented" instead of empty.
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.4
Features
- MyBackup compatibility, thanks to Nathan!
- Display group changes and message timer changes in chat.
Fixes
- Fix usage of configured attachment path
- Fix the many empty messages sent by Android and iOS clients for profile key pushes
Translations
- Add Lithuanian, by Gediminas Murauskas
- Updates to Greek, French, Turkish, Dutch, and Vlaams. Thanks to all contributors!
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.3
Emergency release for the HTTP-500 "nothing can be send" bug and the BadKeyType bug.
Fixes
- Identity key read errors
- Update local storage format quirks for future Signal versions
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.2 (yanked)
Emergency release for the HTTP-500 "nothing can be send" bug.
Features
- My Backup compatibility (thanks to Nthn).
- You need to reset all sessions manually after a reset, if they had been touched after taking the backup.
- Share to Whisperfish functionality (thanks to Gabriel Margiani)
- Enabling on SailfishOS 4.0 needs some additional work.
- Database VACUUM option in settings (thanks to Igor Makarov)
- Initial work to decouple Whisperfish from SailfishOS (thanks to Be)
- Migrated to libsignal-client.
Fixes
- The infamous "I can't send anything anymore" HTTP-500 issue
- Crash on certain session resets
Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.1
The milestone on Gitlab for this release
Features
- GroupsV2 compatibility
- Notably, you can only be added to a group, invites are not yet implemented.
- 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!)
- GUI performance improvement
Comments
rob_k
Sun, 2023/02/05 - 22:59
Permalink
Hi Rubdos, Very promising to have Signal in Sailfish.
After I installed Whisperfish, I made it through registration and there is a UUID visible in Settings. But the Websocket status is Disconnected. Is there a way to connect?
X10ii on 4.4.0.72, version v0.6.0-dev
In the meanwhile, I installed the Android app too. That works, but it isn't the same ofcourse!
kempertom
Sun, 2023/02/05 - 22:04
Permalink
Cannot verify. Tells me that maybe I need additional software
ogust_biller
Wed, 2022/11/09 - 22:51
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Wow, nice app! Thank you very much❤
Rene666
Fri, 2022/10/07 - 08:28
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Hello, today I installed Whisperfish on my Xperia 10 III with current SFOS. Unfortunately I don't see any contact names. It's just numbers and letters. Can someone help me? Thanks
rubdos
Fri, 2022/10/07 - 19:11
Permalink
I'm working on solving this as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience!
emchella
Thu, 2022/12/29 - 13:50
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Hi, i have just upgrade the app to day, but no contact list, no way to start new chat.
Enrico
rubdos
Thu, 2022/12/29 - 16:28
Permalink
Whisperfish is currently indeed not capable of sending the first message. You can link Signal Desktop (Settings -> Linked devices) and send the first message through that, or ask your contact to send you the first message.
The way a first message is sent in Signal has been overhauled completely, and we need a lot of cleanup in the code before we can even start implementing it.
treeman
Wed, 2022/10/05 - 11:30
Permalink
Hi Ruben. I scrolled several threads on openrepos, github, tjc... but i didn't found out how to create groups.
Am i to stupid or isn't it possible to add another contact (recipient) to a new or existing conversation?
Thanks a lot.
rubdos
Fri, 2022/10/07 - 19:11
Permalink
Hi! No stupidity involved. You can in principle use Signal Desktop to create groups, but I think that too broke recently.
treeman
Mon, 2022/11/14 - 18:05
Permalink
Thanks for this hint. Indeed there is no possibility to create groups yet. I've tried in Linux and Windows without success.
By the way: great work ☺
illyrion
Thu, 2022/07/14 - 22:55
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I just tried to install Whisperfish. I followed all the steps described for deleting the Android installation on the same devixe. However, no connection established. What is strange: Whisperfish seems to recognize my account, because I have to enter a password when I start Whisperfish. Maybe there is spmething I have to delete in order to fully uninstall Whisperfish?
rubdos
Fri, 2022/07/15 - 16:41
Permalink
Known issue, sorry! You can install beta 8 manually, start it once, and then go back to beta 10. We will fix this in beta 11 soon.
RamBoo
Tue, 2022/07/05 - 17:20
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I had another phone for using signal and I guess it messed up my whisperfish when it connected to internet. Thanks for the advice!
RamBoo
Tue, 2022/06/21 - 19:43
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What to do when it says on the settings "connection status - disconnected" and wont send any messages?
rubdos
Wed, 2022/06/22 - 08:42
Permalink
That sounds like a deactivated registration. Did you register on the Android or iOS application? If so: you can only have one single active registration on a phone.
If that's the case, and if you want to use Whisperfish again, you'll need to follow https://gitlab.com/whisperfish/whisperfish/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Ques... and before that you need to turn-off the registration lock in the Android Signal settings. Cfr. https://gitlab.com/rubdos/whisperfish/-/issues/148 and https://gitlab.com/rubdos/whisperfish/-/issues/149
rob_k
Thu, 2022/03/31 - 18:58
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How to paste a captcha string that is so long, that it won't fit in one terminal line?
rubdos
Thu, 2022/03/31 - 19:02
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I haven't been able to reproduce that it doesn't fit in one line myself. I'm not sure why it would not work.
Either way, there's a few things you can do. I've changed the wiki with a simple one: instead of first ssh-ing into the device, you run ssh with the command in one go.
skyjumper
Mon, 2022/07/18 - 02:07
Permalink
That command format worked a treat for me - thanks !
rob_k
Sun, 2022/03/27 - 19:07
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Very promising, the workaround for the captcha. Unfortunately I get:
[2022-03-27T16:01:41Z INFO harbour_whisperfish] Start main app (with autostart = false) [D] unknown:0 - Using Wayland-EGL library "libGLESv2_adreno.so" not found library "eglSubDriverAndroid.so" not found [2022-03-27T16:01:41Z INFO harbour_whisperfish::gui] QmlApp::application loaded - version v0.6.0-beta.8 [W] __cpp_closure_14317703314545309294_impl:182 - Failed to load translator for ("en-GB") Searched "/usr/share/harbour-whisperfish/translations" for "harbour-whisperfish" [W] unknown:0 - "Query failed: no such function: icu_load_collation Unable to execute statement\nSELECT icu_load_collation('en_GB', 'localeCollation')" [W] unknown:0 - "Failed to configure collation for locale en_GB: " [W] unknown:0 - "Query failed: no such function: icu_load_collation Unable to execute statement\nSELECT icu_load_collation('en_GB', 'localeCollation')" [W] unknown:0 - "Failed to configure collation for locale en_GB: " [W] unknown:0 - "Failed to attach key memory region for qtcontacts-sqlite-np: QSharedMemory::attach (shmget): doesn't exist" [W] unknown:0 - "Failed to open contacts transient store" [W] unknown:0 - "Unable to open synchronous engine database connection" [W] unknown:0 - QSqlQuery::prepare: database not open [W] unknown:0 - "Failed to prepare distinct display label group selection query: \n SELECT DISTINCT DisplayLabelGroup FROM DisplayLabels ORDER BY DisplayLabelGroupSortOrder ASC" [2022-03-27T16:01:42Z INFO harbour_whisperfish::worker::setup] SetupWorker::run [2022-03-27T16:01:42Z INFO harbour_whisperfish::worker::setup] identity_key not found [2022-03-27T16:01:42Z INFO harbour_whisperfish::config::settings] Setting default settings. [D] unknown:0 - Starting favorites query at 380 ms [D] unknown:0 - Favorites queried in 566 ms [D] unknown:0 - Starting metadata query at 659 ms [D] unknown:0 - All queried in 682 msBTW command seems too long, so I pasted the url in two parts:
rubdos
Sun, 2022/03/27 - 19:55
Permalink
There seems to be a newline in the captcha string you pasted on terminal; that should really not be there. That gets misinterpreted and rejected by Signal.
rossholmes
Fri, 2022/02/18 - 16:52
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Messed up something probably. I'm trying to register, but when, I entered my phone number, selected text verification method, and the app crashed upon I chose Continue. Any idea?
rubdos
Sat, 2022/02/19 - 13:54
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Yes. Registration is currently broken in SailfishOS 4.2 and 4.3, without any workaround: https://gitlab.com/whisperfish/whisperfish/-/issues/366
Our hope is that SailfishOS 4.4 fixes it, or gives us another clue about what's up.
Termitebug
Thu, 2022/02/17 - 18:23
Permalink
Hi! Would it be possible to unlock GUI-password with sailfish-sercrets for convenience's sake? For now, I'm copy-pasting from ownKeepass the unlock password. This is just a feature request and if it cannot be done I'm okay with that answer.
rubdos
Sat, 2022/02/19 - 13:53
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It's a feature request and it's certainly possible some day. Feel free to upvote here: https://gitlab.com/rubdos/whisperfish/-/issues/2
ric9k
Tue, 2022/02/08 - 23:51
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Hi,
Thank you for Whisperfish.
Is there a way to use whisperfish if I register to signal on another device?
Thanks,
rubdos
Wed, 2022/02/09 - 11:33
Permalink
In Signal, one "device" is the main device (this is currently always a phone), and you can link as many secondary devices as you want (which is currently either an Apple iPad or a computer). Whisperfish currently only supports being the main device. If you want to use multiple devices, you need to register Whisperfish as main device and link all other devices to Whisperfish.
Currently, Whisperfish registration is broken since SailfishOS 4.3.
delocoyo
Fri, 2021/12/10 - 22:35
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What is the channel in matrix? I cant find it.
rubdos
Wed, 2022/02/09 - 11:32
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I didn't see the notification for this comment; sorry! The channel is #whisperfish:rubdos.be
If you cannot find it, you can leave me your Matrix username and I can invite you in!
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/12/09 - 17:08
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when will be possible to use whisperfish for a newer user?
delocoyo
Thu, 2021/12/02 - 17:16
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Thanks rubdos.
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