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.
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).
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, inviting new members, deleting members (planned for later)
- Message quotes (the UI element is there, but the implementation currently lacks)
- Many other UI features are just stubs at this point.
- Whisperfish as secondary device, if you register Whisperfish, your previous registration (Android/iOS) gets disabled.
SailfishOS platform version notes and known issues
The intention is to keep as many versions of SailfishOS supported for as long as possible. Some versions show bugs specific to that SailfishOS version. If it is not possible to upgrade to the version mentioned below, you can use the workarounds mentioned here.
Currently highest tested SailfishOS version: SailfishOS 4.2
SailfishOS 3.x series
Bugs present in the Sailfish 3.x series
In principle, Whisperfish works on SailfishOS 3.3, except for registration.
- Registration on SailfishOS 3.3. As a workaround, register on another device, and move over your data.
Installation on SailfishOS 3.x
Since the release of SailfishOS 4.3, there has been an ABI-incompatible change between 3.x and 4.x. Whisperfish is now built separately for 3.x and 4.x, and both packages are available in this repository. If Storeman cannot figure out the correct version for your 3.x installation, you can install Whisperfish via the commandline (after adding the repository):
zypper install harbour-whisperfish-0.6.0.beta.7-0.sf3.armv7hl
SailfishOS 4.x series
The Sailfish 4.x 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 any other version than SailfishOS 4.0, 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.
- Especially SailfishOS 4.2 required a major change in the event loop structure. Make sure you use Whisperfish 0.6.0-beta.6 or later.
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!
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 (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.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
NGC_Ollie
Fri, 2020/11/27 - 01:52
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Ok, you got me, I installed alpha5. Thanks for that, works like a charm, a huge improvement, especially the groups. Only tiny bits I found:
- when I switch from a dark to a light ambiance the font stays in the dark mode.
- sometimes I'm unable to see my last messages in the groups when on the conversations overview. I don't really care about that, but it's good to know.
- Image preview from pics I sent stay as a filled rectangle, no preview. But it sends, that's important!
Would you like to have issues/tickets on github or do you prefer comments like this?
rubdos
Fri, 2020/11/27 - 10:49
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Issues on Gitlab work the best, indeed. We're aware of the second issue (there's a merge request for that in progress), but number one and three are currently undocumented. Filing at https://gitlab.com/rubdos/whisperfish/-/issues/new would be thoroughly apperiated!
I'm glad you like the new version :-)
NGC_Ollie
Thu, 2020/11/26 - 09:29
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Actually there is no main show stopper, so you're right, beta might be considerable, since 0.5 gets more and more unstable. I need a smooth transition from 0.5 to 0.6, that's all, because I use WF since ages and I don't want to lose all conversations. I need that app on a daily basis, because I avoid any messenger like whatsapp, Telegram or worse.
rubdos
Thu, 2020/11/26 - 14:59
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FWIW, the only known issue on Whisperfish 0.6 alpha.5 is during registration. If you currently run 0.5, I think you'd be happy to try out alpha.5 already. I'm using it as daily, together with many others. 0.6 uses the exact same db and storage as 0.5, the compatibility was my first priority.
EDIT: wrt to 0.5 compatibility, 0.6 only supports the encrypted database ON, unencrypted database is untested (at least by me), but should be easy enough to implement. Let me know if you have any peculiar settings, because we've mainly tested default settings!
NGC_Ollie
Mon, 2020/11/23 - 16:59
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Ok, I love WF, it's the last reason why I can deactivate the Android layer. Thanks a lot for maintaining this app. I didn't install it yet, because I'm a sheepish chicken, but as soon as 0.6 is stable I'll drown you with feedback.
rubdos
Mon, 2020/11/23 - 20:54
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The "stable" label is something I'm very careful with, won't be there for a while. The meaning of "stable" will be the feature parity with 0.5. I think you might want to consider stepping in at beta.1 or beta.2, I expect those to be mostly bug-free (but not feature complete). We haven't had very many bugs yet, and those bugs we had, were easily mitigated.
I am interested in hearing what the main blockers or would-be features are for you! Thanks for the feedback :-)
broncheoli
Sun, 2020/11/22 - 22:00
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Dear rubdos,
first of all, thanks for developing this app, I will pay you some money for your effort.
I have a problem. I had signal installed to try it out. After some installing and deleting Whisperfish, I also deleted Signal. No problem so far. I now wanted to newly register with wisperfish but the dialog refuses to show up. I deleted WF and also deleted the folder under ~/.config with no luck, after reinstalling WF no register-dialog. What more do I have to delete to start from scratch?
Thanks in advance, broncheolus.
broncheoli
Sun, 2020/11/22 - 22:58
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I found the solution. I also deleted the WF folder under ~/.local/share/. Everything works fine now. Thanks. :-))
rubdos
Mon, 2020/11/23 - 12:00
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For future reference: deleting ~/.local/share/harbour-whisperfish indeed resets the complete application state. Resetting the settings is possible too, by removing ~/.config/harbour-whisperfish/*. The latter contains settings like your phone number and registration UUID.
lispy
Fri, 2020/11/20 - 19:48
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Hmm...login worked, but how do I add contacts? The adressbook is empty.
rubdos
Sat, 2020/11/21 - 14:54
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Fixed with alpha.5! :-)
rubdos
Fri, 2020/11/20 - 21:32
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Working on getting that polished again... Currently (alpha.4), you pull down on the contact selection and manually enter a phone number. Enter it as a local phone number (without intl. prefix), and make sure you have set your country code in the Whisperfish settings.
I might release alpha.5 this weekend to get rid of that issue.
objectifnul
Thu, 2020/11/19 - 17:09
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Logged in successfully, thanks!
PawelSpoon
Tue, 2020/11/17 - 22:10
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Start, login successfull
predator2019
Fri, 2020/05/22 - 15:08
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Ok, great.
predator2019
Mon, 2020/05/18 - 18:48
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Thanx for your work! Sailors need this app really! I am liitle unsure to install 0.6. on my mobile. Is it safe to install it? Any experience on an Inoi R7?
rubdos
Tue, 2020/11/17 - 17:52
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At this point, you may be interested in trying it out! If you never installed Whisperfish 0.5 before, and if you don't have any recent groups (groupv2, later than October 2020), it may work out very well for you.
rubdos
Mon, 2020/05/18 - 19:03
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No. Please do not install it yet, it's a work in progress. I will update the app description when it becomes safe. Feel free to join us on Matrix for further discussion (or on Freenode #whisperfish)!
Nokius
Sat, 2020/05/02 - 10:46
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Is there anyway to support you?
do you need testing devices or some clubmate?
Thanks for you work!!
rubdos
Sat, 2020/05/02 - 16:32
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When I reach 0.6-alpha, I'll install a coffee-donate-button (maybe even in the App) :-)
I've got a nice Xperia 10 here to work on, no need for devices at this point. What does help is nagging me now and then, here, on Gitlab, on IRC (I made #whisperfish on Freenode) or Matrix (#whisperfish:rubdos.be).
EDIT, I've made a [Liberapay profile](https://liberapay.com/rubdos/), where you can sponser said coffee. I'll start advertising that in the main description when I reach alpha :-)
nephros
Fri, 2020/04/24 - 15:27
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Yes, reliably backing up the data would be very useful, I have repeatedly lost media and conversation history through reinstall/re-registrering.
rubdos
Fri, 2020/04/24 - 16:13
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No promises, but I've noted it on the bug tracker.
nephros
Sun, 2020/04/19 - 12:40
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Hey, nice to see some activity in this area. Would it be possible to enable co-existence with the 0.5 version? It ia working ok for me but I would like to test your version as well.
rubdos
Sun, 2020/04/19 - 18:08
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I don't think I'm going to do that, since that would introduce two migration paths. I'm also quite confident that protocol-wise, it'll be impossible to "downgrade" an account at a certain point.
Either way, I'll clearly state so in here and on Gitlab while it's alpha or beta quality. I don't plan to release anything called "stable" if it's
onnot on par (feature wise) with the original! I'll also provide instructions on how to back-up your 0.5 data if you would want to alpha/beta-test.Pages