Night Drop 0.1.20

Background delivery no longer stops after six hours

On Android 15 and 16 the system was ending background delivery once it had run six cumulative hours in a day, and nothing said so — Night Drop simply stopped receiving messages until you reopened it, and did not resume on its own. Measured on a phone overnight: the service ended at exactly 6h 0m 0s and the app received nothing for the next five hours.

The connection now runs under a foreground-service type that has no such budget. And if the system ever does stop it for some other reason, the app tells you instead of quietly going offline — that silence was the real problem, since a messenger that has stopped receiving looks exactly like a messenger nobody has written to.

Also in this release

Cover traffic is remembered. Turning it on and restarting the app used to switch it back off silently. Dummy traffic is meant to be indistinguishable from nothing, so this was not something you could have noticed.

Chats warn when the other person cannot report screenshots. On any Android below 14, and on desktop, a screenshot raises no notice at all — so the absence of one from that peer was never evidence that none was taken. The warning is shown to you, about them: the person deciding what to send is the one who needs it.

Deleting your identity now removes Tor's directory cache too. It held no keys or contacts, but it did carry a timestamp of when Tor last ran, next to an app that presents itself as freshly installed.

Verifying this download

Every file is GPG-signed by security@nightdrop.app (key included below), and SHA256SUMS covers all of them. See SECURITY.md for the full verification steps.

The three per-ABI APKs are reproducible from source by F-Droid: versionCodes 4061 (armeabi-v7a), 4062 (arm64-v8a), 4063 (x86_64). NightDrop.apk is the universal build (4064) — take that one if you are unsure which to use.