What's New?

This is the first pre-release for the long-awaited "rewrite"! Due to the breadth of how much has changed, we would love to get as many testers using this as possible, to make sure that the stable release will be rock solid

Note: After upgrading, if you do not see contacts/avatars, just close and re-open the app. They will be there, don't worry. We changed our contacts system.

The Big Stuff

• Full rewrite of the entire app
  • Backend completely redone to reduce potential for bugs and increase maintainability
  • Frontend completely redone to improve performance drastically and make the app prettier & more fun to use
  • Some stats:
    • 80,000+ lines of code modified
    • 450+ files changed
    • 100+ issues closed
    • 4 months / hundreds of hours in the making
    • Over 500 commits
• Performance has drastically improved, which should also improve average FPS within the app.
  • Users with large contact lists should no longer see a long hang on the splash screen when opening the app.
  • You should no longer see "jank" when opening chats
  • The message send animation is much smoother
• iMessage parity
  • Display mentions in bold
  • Display unsent messages
  • Display edited messages, along with their past edits
  • Improved URL previews
  • Image previews get clipped using the message bubble tail
  • Display more information for iMessage apps (e.g. Shazam, Apple Pay, YouTube, OpenTable, etc)
• Notification reliability improvements
• Way, way, way too many other changes to count. Bug fixes, performance improvements, new features - you name it, the app got it.

Removed Features

These are features that we may re-implement in the future, however, were removed for some good reasons.

• Swipe actions on conversation tiles in iOS theme - use long-press for same functionality instead
• Auto-play message effects - not reliable and seamless enough for prime-time
  • You can still manually play then by tapping the effect replay button
• Reduced number of options in redacted mode

What's Next?

• 3 letters - take a guess ;) - how else could we follow up an update as big as this one?