v1.3 - Dark Mode, Group Chat

Rachel Hamlin -

In version 1.3, Status catches up to the most important design trend in recent history with the introduction of a dark mode.

Hyperbolic? Perhaps, but we’ve heard your requests and we made it happen. Your app’s appearance will now default to match your system settings, but if you’d like, you can head to Profile > Appearance to override it. Dark mode sure is easy on the eyes.

Beyond that, we’re bringing back private groups, another highly requested feature. Private groups allow you to add up to 9 friends to an invite-only chat. At the protocol level, group chats in Status function similarly to 1:1 chats. They’re end-to-end encrypted by default and utilise perfect forward secrecy to protect your privacy.

In the future, we’d like to expand these to host more than 10 members. We’ll embark on further testing to determine the upper limit that our current protocol can support.

Lastly, we’ve changed our webview implementation over to the react-native-community package, to remain in sync with the React Native community and benefit from upstream improvements.

As always, we’ve also included a few nice fixes in this release. For the full changelog, see our Github.

Added

  • Dark mode
  • Group chat

Changed

  • Browser implementation now using react-native-community webview package

Fixed

  • Updates to back navigation
  • Persistent wallet value
  • Update to all text input, increasing pressable areas
  • Improved seed phrase text input on small screens
  • Easier to find user’s public key for sharing
  • Shortened universal links