Paul HittandClaude Opus 5 62b4798881 "Nobody here yet" was also what a failed load looked like
🔴 **A claim about the account, made about a request that failed.** Both roster
load sites swallow failures with
`runCatching { … }.getOrDefault(emptyList())`, so a network hiccup, an expired
token or a rate limit all produced an empty list — and the contacts card then
said "Nobody here yet. Add someone by the username they signed up with."

Someone whose contacts had simply failed to fetch was told they had none.

Found by auditing the shape that hid the iOS group bug: a swallowed failure
that renders as a confident empty state. Six such sites exist on Android; the
two on the sign-in and restore paths are the ones a user meets first.

`Phase.SignedIn` now carries `buddiesLoaded`, defaulting to FALSE so a phase
built without saying so cannot assert the fetch succeeded. The empty state only
claims emptiness when the list actually loaded; otherwise it says the load
failed and what to do.

Verified on the emulator with the radios off: the card reads "Couldn't load
your contacts. Check the connection and sign in again." With the network back,
the roster loads and the contact shows as before.

⚠️ Four sites remain that still default to empty on failure — groups, stories,
and two others. They deserve the same treatment; contacts came first because it
is the screen somebody lands on. Android suites green (194 tests).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-26 12:00:15 -04:00

Flamenet Messenger — Android

Nothing here is an app yet. This is the engine, and it is deliberately first.

An Android client needs the protocol implemented a third time. That third implementation is the one that finds the places where the specification says less than the two existing engines quietly agreed on — but only if it is written against the spec and the published vectors rather than against a reading of our own Swift and JavaScript. So the engine comes first, it is a plain Kotlin/JVM library with no Android in it at all, and it is held to engine/test/vectors/protocol-v1.json — the same file the other two engines are checked against, read from that one location rather than copied here.

./gradlew :engine:test

No Android SDK, no emulator, no device. It runs anywhere a JVM does, which is also what lets it run in CI on Linux.

What the engine covers today

Area Spec State
Safety numbers §7 Done — fingerprints and conversation ordering match the published vectors
Key transparency verification §19 Done — RFC 6962 leaf/node hashing, unbalanced split, bottom-up audit paths
Byte helpers — Unsigned comparison, constant-time equality

What it does not cover

Listed rather than left to be discovered, because a table of green ticks with the hard parts quietly missing is worse than no table:

Area Spec State
X25519 / Ed25519 §3 Not started — needs a provider that works on both JVM and Android
X3DH key agreement §4 Not started
Double Ratchet §6 Not started
Sealed sender §12 Not started
ML-KEM-768 hybrid §11 Not started
ML-DSA-65 identities §20 Not started
Relay client §8 Not started
The app itself — Not started

Until those exist, Android is honestly marked "not started" on the website, and a conversation gets the protocol's guarantees only when both ends are iOS.

Why the vectors matter more than the code

Two implementations that agree may both be wrong in the same way, especially when one was written while reading the other. The audit-path ordering in §19 is the worked example: a top-down reading of a bottom-up path produces the correct root for every left-spine index, so it passes any test that only checks index 0. The vector file pins a right-descending index for that reason, and the Kotlin tests assert both that the published path verifies and that the same path reversed does not.

If this engine ever disagrees with the file, the interesting question is which of the three is wrong — not this one by default.

S
Description
Flamenet Messenger for Android — the Kotlin engine, held to the published protocol vectors. No app yet. MIT.
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