Zerion 3.0.15

Zerion 3.0.15 is the security and reliability release that follows the October 2026 internal assessment of the Android app. It touches calls, attachments, channels, groups, the offline mesh, the network layer, account protection and the build, and it contains the fixes to the behaviour several of you reported on networks that keep dropping.

What is new or fixed

• Reconnecting after a signal gap. When a contact's phone loses its connection for a while, the two phones now find each other again within a minute or two. Before, the phone that stayed online kept using the contact's stale onion address information and Tor waited about fifteen minutes before asking for the current one, so the contact looked offline for that long unless Tor was restarted. The device that lost its connection now republishes its address as soon as Tor is back, and the other side refreshes what it knows about the contact after two failed attempts.
• Network status. A wrong device clock reported by Tor is now shown as such instead of a status that stays on "Connecting" or "Publishing", and on phones whose connection keeps dropping (for example while a VPN reconnects) the address no longer stays on "Publishing".
• Calls. A call whose connection is lost ends on both phones about 90 seconds after the last audio arrived, while a shorter network stall still recovers. A call placed or answered while the previous call is still ending is no longer lost. The call screen honours the screen lock and the app lock, and the ongoing-call notification opens the call.
• Contact keys renew. Between two devices that both run 3.0.15, the long-term key a pair of contacts shares is refreshed at the start of a connection (at most once every ten minutes), so a copy taken from a phone or a backup stops working after the next renewal.
• Attachments. Photos, videos and audio shared in groups and channels are stripped of location and other hidden metadata, as in one-to-one chats. A text sent while a large video is still transferring is no longer held behind it, and parts of an attachment that are still queued are no longer sent twice.
• Channels. Approval of new subscribers works, editors can post text, a deleted channel tells its subscribers for 14 days, and rotating the invite link no longer makes the owner's own earlier posts unreadable.
• Contacts. Contacts introduced to you are stored as post-quantum, safety numbers of version 2 cover both identity keys, and contacts added by link are no longer marked as verified without a comparison.
• Build. Tor uses OpenSSL 3.5.8. The Monero library is built in a fixed, minimal environment, so the same recipe produces the same bytes whatever environment starts it, and the F-Droid recipe keeps Gradle dependency verification on. Opening the project in Android Studio no longer fails with a missing lock state for the configuration copies the IDE resolves.
• App texts. Unused Mailbox and crash-report texts are removed and the security wording of several screens is corrected; translations of corrected texts other than Dutch fall back to English until they are translated again.

The issues rated High and the main Medium ones, as they stood in 3.0.14, are listed in SECURITY.md. Contacts on 3.0.14 keep working with 3.0.15; the key renewal and the faster reconnection need 3.0.15 on both sides to take full effect.

Verifying this build

APK SHA-256	5f25fd6416ecc446e3910a984667207363531ce1fd6cd7f7974f7dcbe7e8bf3f
Signing certificate SHA-256	d7fdb11125890d133ae89d8ba4f4331d9045e21ef01d9899a7cdee6888f704c8
Source commit	0849b088105c1fb53c8ea8cb7677d09576e0d612
Source tag	v3.0.15
Source tree	63d4fe0f544d2713d87df1783832a90f067220ef
Tor executable, arm64-v8a	586209695b73aea897086d0500b7ef1dcccb0a5a8a002c4e1903ab2ad866dced
Tor executable, armeabi-v7a	1b83790304f4c15a283ada143d35ef86a30027d814d0cd8cf6e1004c360eeb09

release-manifest-3.0.15.json records the same values together with the hash
of every native library in the APK and the environment it was built in.
SHA256SUMS.txt covers the attached files.

The APK is the unsigned output of fdroid build --test --on-server com.professor.zerion:31500 in registry.gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver:buildserver-trixie
(F-Droid's build layout, Tor and Monero compiled from pinned source by the
recipe), signed outside the container with the same key as every previous
release. apksigcopier compare against that unsigned output passes and every
entry of the APK is identical.

The F-Droid metadata for 3.0.15 pins this commit and keeps Gradle dependency
verification on.

Full notes for every release are in CHANGELOG.md.

Built reproducibly (F-Droid), signed with the same key as previous releases.