Night Drop 0.1.17

Night Drop was resetting its own Tor connection on devices that were working perfectly — roughly once every launch — and the replacement connection was slower than the one it discarded. That is fixed, and it is the reason this release exists.

What changed

Tor connects faster and stays connected. The app's automatic "repair" for a stuck Tor connection was firing on healthy devices: it judged health by whether the onion descriptor had published, which turns out to report bootstrap progress, not liveness. A phone with its descriptor on 8/8 directories for both time periods, all four introduction points up and zero upload failures still read as "not published" — so about two and a half minutes into every session the app threw away its entry guards and its learned connection timings and started over. Automatic repair now only happens on evidence that messages actually are not moving.

A pairing code no longer dies mid-pairing. An in-flight short code was held only in memory, so anything that rebuilt the connection discarded it while the inviter's screen still showed the code — the person joining timed out and it looked like the inviter's fault. Codes now survive, including across an app restart within their ten-minute life.

Background delivery is offered during setup, with what it costs and what it does not do, instead of being buried in a menu. Android suspends the app whenever it is off screen, so without it messages only arrive when you open the app. Deleting your identity now turns it back off.

Verifying this release

gpg --import nightdrop-signing-key.asc
gpg --verify SHA256SUMS.asc SHA256SUMS
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

Fingerprint: 079B A016 9201 A8AB 11F3 2385 884E ACB8 89D0 2002

The three per-ABI APKs are built by the F-Droid recipe in fdroid/app.nightdrop.yml at commit 7ef09fa, so they can be reproduced independently.