[Alpha] Greenline - A qml Whatsapp client for Ubuntu Touch

brenno.almeida

New release: message prior this release can look strange because of a refactor I did, to avoid problems disconnect your whatsapp account in settings and reconnect after installing this update

https://github.com/brennoflavio/greenline/releases

Draft support: typing in a chat will save your message next time you get back to that chat
Complete rework of how this app handles notifications, which should enable new features for specific message types in the future
Fix a bug that made the user avatar go away when downloading media in a group chat
Mentions should be rendered correctly now, including notifications
Simplified the unread count bubble (although its a big buggy now)
Centralized name resolution, now the app is consistent when showing names across replies, chat lists, headers, etc
Fixed a bug if you start a chat, the chat will have your name
Full support for edited messages: now the new text is shown with an edited badge, and you can edit your own messages aswell

Linus67

I’d actually prefer to do without META products. But that’s hardly possible. My music mates, tennis pals and other friends only use WhatsApp.
For my UT as a day-to-day device, there wasn’t really anything useful like a quick-check app to see what’s going on with certain WhatsApp users (groups) who organise all their appointments and updates in groups.
WhatsNew never really worked for me. Too slow, too cluttered.

This morning I installed Grennlines. It’s a really good project and a perfect solution to my unwelcome WhatsApp dependency. Many thanks for the solution.
For me, the current state of development is already perfect. It starts up very quickly and has everything I need. Let me buy you a bottle of wine!

Linus67

"Hi Brenno, I'm using Greenline on a Pixel 3a (Ubuntu Touch RC). I noticed that the greenline-daemon stays active and consumes significant resources even when notifications are disabled in the app settings. On older devices, this leads to OOM (Out of Memory) crashes and system reboots.
Feature Request: Could you add a 'Kill Daemon on Exit' toggle for users who don't need background notifications? If notifications are off, the daemon shouldn't stay resident in memory after closing the UI."

Linus67

PS:
Now I use a skript (systemctl --user stop greenline.service) and use it with a Desktop link. This works perfectly for my WhatsApp usage. This way, I can stop all WhatsApp data usage completely if I don’t need Greenline for a few days.

Vlad Nirky

@Linus67
Could you tell me how to add the script shortcut in Lomiri?
Greenline is great (to keep my wife happy – she uses WhatsApp and sees it as the most obvious way to communicate)

Linus67

@Vlad-Nirky

nano ~/.local/share/applications/gkill.desktop

ini
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Stop Greenline
Exec=/home/phablet/stop_greenline.sh
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/phablet/Pictures/greenline_stop.png

Vlad Nirky

@Linus67 said:

nano ~/.local/share/applications/gkill.desktop

ini
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Stop Greenline
Exec=/home/phablet/stop_greenline.sh
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/phablet/Pictures/greenline_stop.png

Thank you for this.

brenno.almeida

Nice script to stop the daemon, I added to the todo list to include before release

mihael

And then how do you restart the service? - simply by restarting the app? or by systemctl --user start greenline.service ?

Linus67

@mihael simply by restarting the app

ChromiumOS-Guy

@brenno.almeida awesome app, switched to it.
a thing you should add, is aytanna message indicator support so we can see messages after timer runs out.

other then that, i think you should expand settings to include all the standard chat and profile settings.

also sqlite db files should be encrypted if possible.

brenno.almeida

@mihael the app has a built in logic to recover the daemon in case of a crash, which seems to be working here

brenno.almeida

@ChromiumOS-Guy what do you mean by seeing the message after time runs out?

nbdynl

@ChromiumOS-Guy this app is draining my battery faster then my cat can eat, other then that amazing

ChromiumOS-Guy

@brenno.almeida about that never mind, the background daemon took a bit of time to start handeling notifications properly.

ChromiumOS-Guy

@nbdynl compared to a full electron app like whatsnew this might as well use no battery.

at least from my perspective its noticeably better, could be improvements considering this is native and comparing it to electron is like having the bar underground, you pass it by existing above ground.

to be fair, I have (with greenline) four service daemons that are not optimized running so whatever improvement there is I feel keenly.

nbdynl

@ChromiumOS-Guy also so fast compared to the other apps. he obviously is doing great work

StephPTi

Thank you very much for this app. I have everything i need so far and its working well and very fast. until now, the battery usage is also good .

brenno.almeida

Thanks for the feedback you all, any issues please report.

We have a new release: https://github.com/brennoflavio/greenline/releases

Experimental support to record voice messages. Give it a try and report if it works for you
Support for messages with images and buttons
New icon and splash screen
Support for deleted messages, both seeing deleted messages and deleting your own messages

Linus67

Hi @brenno.almeida

First of all, thank you so much for your incredible work on Greenline! Seeing a native QML WhatsApp client moving forward so quickly on Ubuntu Touch is amazing. The recent alpha builds with voice messages and message deletion show huge progress.
As a tester, I noticed an interesting behavior regarding the main chat list:
The app currently populates the history with every single JID (Jabber ID) available from the server's sync history. This includes old "ghost contacts" (like one-time marketplace buyers), unknown numbers, or old groups that were long deleted or left on the main device. When you click them, they just show an empty chat view.
I suspect that filtering these out isn't a quick "one-click" fix, as the underlying protocol/daemon likely dumps the raw cached stream of all historical chat channels upon connection, without the local filters that the official Android/iOS apps use.
Since you are probably busy with core features, I was thinking about some pragmatic ways to tackle this on the client/UI side whenever you find the time:

Frontend Filtering (QML Delegate): A quick visual fix could be using a filter or modifying the ChatDelegate in QML. If the model's row indicates that there is no lastMessageText (or the timestamp is null), the item's visibility could be set to false and its height to 0.
Database Query Filtering (Backend): If Greenline stores the synced chats in a local SQLite database, modifying the SQL query that populates the QML model might do the trick (e.g., SELECT * FROM chats WHERE last_message_id IS NOT NULL OR unread_count > 0).

Just wanted to share this observation and some ideas. No rush at all—the app already looks and feels great for an alpha state!
Keep up the fantastic work!

P.S. (Added positive note):
Actually, having this long history of contacts has a surprisingly positive side effect! It acts like a historical WhatsApp-specific phone book. It's amazing to see how incredibly fast, reliable, and battery-friendly Greenline already runs after just about 3 months of development. It’s a massive upgrade compared to the sluggish, battery-draining WebApp solutions we had before. If you ever decide to filter the main chat list, maybe this "raw list" could be repurposed into a dedicated "WhatsApp Contacts/History" tab in the future?