Orbit v0.8.7-beta

Orbit v0.8.7-beta

Version: v0.8.7-beta
Commit: b5151f2
Built: 2026-10-11

Note: A release about the composer, and about asking. The "+" finally has one door instead of five, Orbit asks for the permissions it needs once — and only for the ones that are actually missing — and four bugs that each broke something you do every day are gone: a dismissed link preview that stayed dismissed all session, a contact menu that opened empty, a contacts grid wider than the screen, and a staged attachment that vanished on the desktop.

Features

• The Composer's "+" Is One Door Now — It used to drop a five-item list, and the first two entries were "Upload Images" and "Upload Videos" — the same intent split by file type, decided before you had seen anything. It opens a sheet now: a media panel and a pill row along the bottom, Photos · Poll · Commands · Files. The picker decides between an image and a video, so the split is gone. Camera goes straight to the camera and Gallery takes images and videos in one go. Commands is the door to the slash-command reference, which until now you could only reach by knowing to type a /.
• Orbit Asks for Permissions Once, at Startup — Permissions were requested from three unrelated places and none of them could read the current state, so a permission you had already granted was asked for again on every single launch. One of them opened the camera on every start — getUserMedia({video:true}) and then stopping the tracks — purely to provoke the OS dialog, so the camera indicator lit up whether or not you were about to scan anything. There is one pass now, it reads what is actually granted first, and it asks only for what is missing, once per version. If everything is already granted it does nothing at all — no sheet, no dialog, no camera. The sheet says what each one is for before the system dialog appears, which is the difference between answering a question and being interrupted by one. It also asks for the two things that are not permissions and so cannot be a dialog: keeping Orbit awake in the background, and letting it open the installer for its own updates — which until now was asked for after the update had already downloaded, throwing you into Settings with the download wasted.

Improved

• The Vault's Restore-From-File Row Moved Above the Buttons — It sat below Export and Restore, which put it after the actions it has nothing to do with and made it read as a footnote to them. It is not an action on this vault; it is the recovery path for a vault that is already gone, and the only one that survives deleting the app. Every other row on that screen is a setting, so it belongs with the rows.

Fixed

• A Dismissed Link Preview Stayed Dismissed for the Whole Session — ⚠ Reported as "pasted links are not recognised, and links ending in / are not recognised." Neither was happening. All four combinations were measured first — typed and pasted, with and without the trailing slash — and the detection was already correct in every one. The real cause was the dismissal: it was keyed by URL for the whole session, so once the bar for a link had been dismissed, putting that same link back into the composer showed nothing at all. That is the one moment a preview is genuinely wanted, because you are looking at the link you are about to send. One cause, two symptoms, and the report pointed at neither.
• The Three-Dots Menu on a Contact Opened an Empty Sheet — It drew the sheet and nothing but the Cancel pill. The menu only ever pushed group items and folder items, so for a direct message with the experimental folder feature off — the default — the list came out empty. A contact's actions are user actions, and there is already a sheet for exactly that, so a direct message now opens it: View Profile, Message, Mute, Close DM, Block.
• The Contacts Grid Was Wider Than the Screen — ⚠ Reported as "it feels kinda too spaced out", which was not what was wrong. 1fr 1fr means minmax(auto, 1fr), and an auto minimum is the content's min-content width — so one long unbreakable name pushed its column wider than its share. On a 390px phone the two columns measured 188px + 229px = 426px and the right-hand cards were cut off. That is also why the ellipsis on a long name never appeared: the column had simply made room. A layout complaint is a measurement, not an opinion.
• A Re-render Made Staged Attachments Vanish on the Desktop — ⚠ Found by a test that had been written off as flaky. renderChat rebuilds the whole composer, including the staged-attachment strip — which the template emits empty and hidden — and nothing put the staged files back into it. So any re-render while files were staged made the strip disappear while the files were still staged: they would still be sent, and you could no longer see or remove them. Not a rare path — the local-echo chat posts its greeting a few seconds after boot, so it happened on a plain cold start. The measured sequence was 3 tiles at t+0.5s, then 0 tiles with 3 still staged at t+4.5s. The spec passed about half the time, and the only difference was whether the assertion ran before or after that greeting.

Downloads

Artifact	Size
Orbit-v0.8.7-beta.apk	69M
Orbit-0.8.7-beta-amd64.deb	170M
Orbit-0.8.7-beta-x86_64.AppImage	197M
Orbit-0.8.7-beta-arm64.dmg	181M
Orbit-0.8.7-beta-x64.dmg	186M
Orbit Setup 0.8.7-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!