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Orbit v0.8.0-beta (Stable)

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@github-actions github-actions released this 01 Oct 05:53
· 101 commits to main since this release
v0.8.0-beta
3d1e34f

Orbit v0.8.0-beta — Stable Release

Version: v0.8.0-beta
Commit: 3d1e34f
Built: 2026-10-01

Features

  • Your Theme Now Follows You to Your Phone — The pieces for this had been sitting in the codebase since v0.7.3: a whitelist of what may travel, validation on receive, last-write-wins by timestamp. What was missing was the wire. Changing your theme on the desktop now sends it to your own devices — a peer with your userId is you on another machine, and a peer without it is someone else — and the phone applies it. A custom theme's colours travel too, which is the half that matters: the colours are the theme, and until now the name went and the colours stayed behind.
  • Search That Uses the Database — Message search was pulling every message into JavaScript and running includes over it. It now goes through SQLite's FTS5, so project AND deadline is answered by the engine in milliseconds regardless of how much history you have. Prefix matching (deadl*) works, results are ranked by relevance rather than recency, and search can be scoped to one chat. The old scan remains as a fallback for builds without FTS5.
  • A Search Icon in the Shared Media Bar — Inside the field, where it belongs.

Bug Fixes

  • The Update Progress Bar Never Moved — It sat at 0% for the whole download while the label counted megabytes. The total came only from Content-Length, and the mobile's Response is patched to buffer the whole body, so that header is often absent — which left the bar with nothing to divide by. The release asset's declared size was already being read further down to verify the download; it works just as well as the denominator.
  • A Custom Theme's Colours Never Reached the Phone — The module has always whitelisted them and the mobile has always applied them. The colour editor writes to the store directly rather than through the settings funnel, so the broadcast never fired for it. Theme changes went through the funnel and synced; colour changes did not. The apply handler also skips a re-render for the same reason, now fixed with it.
  • The Images Tab Was Showing Video and Audio — And their thumbnails cannot load: a video has no still to show and an audio file has none at all, so both appeared as broken images. Images means images; video and audio go to Files where they get a proper type icon, and the Type filter only offers kinds the current tab can contain.
  • Changing the Display Refreshed the Whole Window — The grid/list toggle wrote its preference through store.setState, which notifies every subscriber — the chat panel, both sidebars, the gallery. Flipping the view now causes zero chat renders.
  • Two Galleries at Once — The Shared Media panel is an overlay anchored to the chat and the gallery takes the full width. Opening the gallery closes the panel.
  • No Way Out of Select Mode — The bulk bar only appeared once something was picked, so entering the mode with nothing selected showed no bar and no way back. It is visible whenever the mode is on, with the action button disabled until something is chosen.
  • Long Filenames Spilled Out of Their Cards — A grid item refuses to shrink below its content without min-width:0, so a long name pushed the card over its neighbour. The ellipsis was already on the name; it had nothing to work with.
  • The Send Button Could Strand You — The composer is rebuilt when a chat re-renders, and anything typed into the old input goes with it. With the button carrying disabled, a rebuild left a visible composer with an inert button and nothing to explain why. It still shows when it can send — the fill and the accent colour — but it no longer carries an attribute that can leave you with no way forward.
  • A Toast Could Swallow the Send Button — The toast stack sits at the bottom-right, which is exactly where the send button is, and its close button takes pointer events. A toast arriving as you went to send ate the click. The stack now clears the composer. This one predates the composer work; the button used to sit differently, which is why nobody had hit it.

Technical

  • Two protocol.js Files, and the One That Matters — The desktop has its own copy and loads that one, not shared/. It never received SETTINGS_SYNC — the shared twin has had it since v0.7.3 — so the packet type did not exist on that platform and the receive branch could never match. Found by probing the constant: it was undefined. When adding a packet type, check both files.
  • FTS5 Is a Compile-Time Option — The migration that builds the index catches the failure and returns rather than letting the app fail to boot, and searchMessages returns [] instead of throwing — including for a malformed query, which throws inside SQLite. A missing search index must never stop the app starting.
  • FTS5's Operators Are Uppercase — The query is lowercased for the scoring, so project and cancelled reached SQLite with a lowercase and, which FTS5 reads as a search term rather than an operator. The engine's syntax and the app's normalisation are two different concerns; they are handled separately now.
  • var Is Function-Scoped, Which Bit Me — A local named hits inside the search function shadowed the results array of the same name, so raw database rows were pushed into the results and the render read .msg off a row that has no such property.
  • Cache Stamps Moved — For app.js, store.js and version.js. store.js had not been stamped since August.

Downloads

Artifact Size
Orbit-v0.8.0-beta.apk 68M
Orbit-0.8.0-beta-amd64.deb 170M
Orbit-0.8.0-beta-x86_64.AppImage 196M
Orbit-0.8.0-beta-arm64.dmg 180M
Orbit-0.8.0-beta-x64.dmg 186M
Orbit Setup 0.8.0-beta.exe 163M

Installation Notes

Desktop builds are currently unsigned.

  • Windows: Microsoft SmartScreen may appear. Select More info → Run anyway if you trust the source.
  • macOS: You may need to right-click the application and choose Open on first launch.
  • Android: Because Orbit is distributed outside the Google Play Store, Android or Google Play Protect may display a warning before installation. Continue only if you trust the release source.

Verify Your Download

A SHA256SUMS.txt file is included with this release.
Since v0.3.0-beta, the checksum file is also GPG-signed (SHA256SUMS.txt.sig).

Use the Orbit Release public key to verify:

# 1. Import the public key
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/D4niel-dev/Orbit-beta/main/security/public-key.asc
gpg --import public-key.asc

# 2. Verify the signature
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.txt.sig SHA256SUMS.txt

# 3. Verify your downloaded file
sha256sum --check SHA256SUMS.txt --ignore-missing

For Windows PowerShell:

Get-FileHash Orbit-Setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256
Compare-Object (Get-Content SHA256SUMS.txt) (Get-FileHash Orbit-Setup.exe -Algorithm SHA256) -Property Hash

Security

Orbit is designed for trusted private networks and local-first communication.
Official releases are published exclusively through this GitHub repository.

Links

  • Repository Orbit-beta
  • View the changelog for the latest changes!
  • Having issues with the app ? Click here to report it!
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