More features:

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

• Now you can reply to messages
• Text input box now renders correctly
• Contact messages now renders correctly, and you can send contact messages
• Chat page should load faster now
• Chat list page now updates when you receive a message and app is opened in background
• User metrics should work now
• Really big text messages should render now, and be collapsed

This post is meant to have a more continuous discussion about PicPocket development.

Download it here: https://open-store.io/app/picpocket.brennoflavio

Yesterday we had a new release allowing zooming images with your fingers, please give it a try!

This app is mostly stable and no big changes are expected, but feel free to suggest unimplemented Immich features and bugs.

Hi everyone! I've been working on a qml Whatsapp client for Ubuntu Touch for a few weeks, now I think its good enough for its alpha release.

The app is not complete, there's still a ton of work to do, and probably many bugs. If you want to test it out, feel free to install in your device, and get back here if you find any bug so I can look at it. The Whatsapp protocol is awful to work with, I'm posting this early to gather feedback about edge cases.

Consider this app as Alpha, don't use it expecting to be 100% functional or complete, but use it to give feedback and help with the development.

Also the app runs unconfined to setup a background daemon, more on the architecture bellow.

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

Once its stable, I'll publish to the store. Now more details about it.

Architecture

This app is composed of 3 parts:

1. Golang Daemon

This daemon managed by Systemd connects to Whatsapp servers and runs continuously in the background, gathering events and pre processing them. Also:

• Manages your encryption keys
• Serialize whatsapp events, stores in a queue
• Expose a JSON RPC endpoint to read and send messages, among other operations
• Syncs users avatars, media, and other data
• Sends notifications

2. Python Backend

Event driven backend that pulls events from the daemon and acts on them, building a chat room and message database. It also sends events to the frontend, updating the message list in real time

3. QML

The frontend is entirely written in qml and communicates with python using pyotherside

In order to pull messages in the background, it needs to run unconfined.

New alpha with more quality of life features:

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

• Integration with lock screen with number of messages read [needs qa]
• Full background sync, faster startup times
• Tapping on a notification opens the chat of that notification
• Support for messages that are only links
• Call notifications
• Only notify the last message of a chat room
• Clear notification for the chat room once chat is opened
• Notification badge support (unread count in the side bar)
• Messages from groups should notify the group name in the title, not the person name [needs qa]

New alpha with features:

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

• Pair Whatsapp with phone number + code
• Settings page now correctly uninstall the daemon from the device
• Block all notifications globally, regardless of Whatsapp configuration
• Text input now correctly renders more than 2 lines
• Show "typing" indicators in the chat page header

@developerbayman your point just suggests that we need better confinement, not to remove it. For example, the alarm app could have apis to run confined

@pparent Just watched the english version, great video, congrats on the release!

@arubislander @pparent app uses whatsmeow, a golang implementation of Whatsapp Web socket. So from Whatsapp perspective, its like you're using Whatsapp Web.

The risk of being banned using unofficial tools is never 0, but extremely low if you don't abuse the tool. Its the same risk of using the WhatsApp Matrix bridge for example, that uses the same library behind the scenes.

@pparent said:

@brenno.almeida

Ok so another confined app does not have permission to access your messages and data, via this Unix socket?

Confined apps cannot access files outside their specified directories (config, data, cache), so they cannot use the socket.

@developerbayman I think its possible to publish with a Google Drive link afaik, as long as the source is available should be fine

There's a new release for this app. I recommend disconnecting an connecting Whatsapp after installing this update using the settings since there was some rework on how messages are represented, which can lead to old glitched messages. Since its an alpha, I'm not guaranteeing consistency on each update:

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

• Better offline mode: now if the app has no connection, messages are queued to be sent once connection is back
• Optimizations for rooms that had a lot of replied messages, should load faster now
• Now the pending / sent / delivered / read icons matches closely with whatsapp
• Better handling when whatsapp servers are unavailable, avoiding app crashes
• Better media previews: now you can zoom in / out images, its easier to pause / reproduce videos, and better look and feel
• Fixed a bug where if the person used whatsapp on two devices (like web and app), its chat appeared duplicated and in groups the profile picture did not appear when the message was sent from the second device
• Prevent app crash when trying to download media while offline

@developerbayman your point just suggests that we need better confinement, not to remove it. For example, the alarm app could have apis to run confined

Just pushed a new release for this app:

• Better image and video controls. Pinch to zoom, double tap, and other gestures. (thanks @kugiigi , heavily inspired in your commit for the gallery app)
• Upgrade some libraries
• Don't crash the person list page if a person does not have a thumbnail
• Support servers with subpaths (like https://example.com/immich)
• Give a better error to the user if app cannot connect to Immich on login

@ChromiumOS-Guy contributions are welcome! But support for all message types is planned before going beta

@pparent No plans for a confined version, mainly due to the burden of mantaining two versions of the same app. The best move here is to work with UT devs for proper support of backgroud services for click packages, so this app can run confined as is.

Support for pausing the daemon when app closes is planned tho, which achieves the same result I think.

@Linus67 The chat list is the source of truth for contact information, there's no separate list of contacts in this app. This makes the code easier to undersand and with fewer moving parts, but the tradeoff is that to render the person name in the group it needs to exist as a individual in the list, so removing chats is not possible.

This is unlikely to change, would add a complexity I don't want to manage. However I do plan to add basic filtering in the list, similar to how Teleports works, which should mitigate this.

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

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

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

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