"Undelivered - will send" on a group bubble was a lie: group text and group
stickers recorded PENDING when members were unreachable and nothing queued
them. The 1:1 outbox could not be stretched over it - a group send fails per
member - so the entry grew the thread it restates, and the design questions got
answers instead of a shrug:
WHO is queued: exactly the members nothing reached. Group text reads them out
of the failure map, where the no-device guard files them as "user:<id>"; the
sticker loop sees per-member results directly. A member whose devices took the
message is NOT queued - resending to them would duplicate it.
WHERE it restates: the group thread, carried on the entry. Restating
threadForUser(member) would touch a 1:1 thread that may not even exist.
WHEN the bubble flips: only when the LAST queued member is reached. Flipping on
the first success would mark the message delivered while other members are
still owed it - "will send" would quietly stop being true for exactly the
people it was still true for. Until the set drains, PENDING remains the honest
label, because the queue genuinely will keep sending.
The test walks the whole rule: two members away, one returns (bubble still
PENDING, one entry left), the second returns (bubble DELIVERED, group thread
redrawn, the prose body not replaced by the wire form).
⚠️ iOS sends to groups too (sendGroupText/sendGroupImage) and still has no
group outbox - it stays on the roadmap with this as the reference
implementation.
Engine, client and app suites green; seven outbox tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
