v1.20 - Wallet Connect & Mutual Contact Requests

on Oct 04, 2022

Status v1.20 introduces experimental support for mutual contact requests, Wallet Connect support, performance improvements, and a lot of bug fixes.

We are 100% transparent. Our entire project is open source (& we welcome contributions).

Can @WhatsApp say the same? @telegram ?
— Status (@ethstatus) September 9, 2022

We stay true to our principles while evolving. Transparency and Openness are the tools for communication and decentralized decision-making.

We are excited to announce that this is the last feature release of the Status Mobile app in it's version 1.x incarnation. After many years of development, enhancements and bugfixes, we are laying the old Status Mobile UI to rest.

Subsequent to this release, all of our development efforts will be fully focused on getting the new fully redesigned Status mobile 2.0 app ready to launch. This redesigned Status Mobile 2.0 will include the Status Communities group chat functionality and a all-new wallet designed and built for multi-chain from the ground up. This is in addition to a completely refreshed user experience that aims to start delivering on the Status' original "Super App" vision.

Check out the major updates of v1.20.

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Status now supports Wallet Connect to sign transactions from your mobile while using dApps on your desktop.

Wallet Connect 2.0 is now using Waku 2.0 under the hood to relay messages in a decentralized manner among their relay nodes.

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With v1.20 you can enable a feature called mutual contacts. With this feature enabled, if you would like to add somebody as a contact, you will need to send them a contact request (and they will also need to accept your contact request) or visa versa.

With mutual contacts enabled, DM messaging is only possible between users who have consented to become contacts with each other. This mechanism prevents DM spam because only people who you have consented to be mutual contacts with can send you DMs.

At any point you (or a person who has agreed to be a contact with you) can change your/their mind and stop being a mutual contacts, which would end both of your ability to DM each other. If you decline a contact request, the Status profile that sent the contact request is blocked from sending you another contact requests (to prevent 'contact request' spam).

Therefore, it is recommended to include a message when sending somebody a contact request so that the other user knows why they should accept your request to become a mutual contact. Of course you can always change your mind and decide to accept a contact request that you previously declined at a later date.

Mutual contacts is the first step in introducing a range of different trust levels, all under your control, so you can choose your level of interactions with other Status users.

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The navigation between screens and chat loading time when opening a chat have been faster. Also, issues with heavy images have been fixed.

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v1.20 also improved syncing contact requests, profile pictures, bookmarks, blocked users, and generated/watch-only wallets.

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The banner shows up for every user installing v1.20. It calls on users that have registered a stateofus.eth name to collect redistributed $ENS. We've received positive feedback on the redistribution, but there is a significant amount of $ENS yet to be collected. Please note that the ENS redistribution will be available until 11 PM, 5 Oct 2022 (UTC).

Update in the App Store or Google Play if you do not have auto updates enabled.

The APK available is here.

The F-Droid release is here.

For the full changelog, see Github.