Paul HittandClaude Opus 5 d8b8d63687 Render Android screens without an emulator
Verifying a layout meant booting an 8 GB AVD, installing an APK,
tapping to a screen and pulling a screencap — and the emulator was
killed by memory pressure four times in one session, each time
mid-check. Robolectric in native-graphics mode draws the same Compose
pixels on the JVM. `Scripts/screenshots.sh` now renders the screens in
about four seconds with no device.

Two things had to be got right and both fail in a way that reads as
something else:

`isIncludeAndroidResources` is not optional — without it the theme
cannot resolve and every render throws on a missing resource, which
looks like a Compose problem rather than a configuration one.

🔴 And the capture. `captureToImage()` goes through PixelCopy and waits
for a frame-commit callback Robolectric never delivers, so every render
died as "Condition still not satisfied after 2000 ms" — which reads as
a hung composition and is nothing of the sort. Drawing the decor view
into a software canvas produces the same pixels with no window
involved. `createComposeRule()` has the same problem for the same
reason; it needs the Activity rule.

⚠️ These are output, not assertions: they write files and pass unless
something throws. A screenshot test that diffs against a stored
baseline is a different thing, worth adding once the design stops
moving — right now it is moving, and a baseline would be re-blessed on
every change, which proves nothing.

This immediately paid for itself. The address card had only ever been
seen in its empty state, because the emulator's stored session predates
the fnid and a fresh sign-in erases that phone's keys. It renders
populated here, and the QR in it — encoded by our own Kotlin encoder,
drawn by the app's own Compose code — decodes back to the exact address
through CoreImage's detector, which shares no line with any of it.

Rendered at the kit's own 375x812 canvas, so a PNG can be put beside
the Sketch artboard rather than mentally rescaled from a 1080x2400
phone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-27 14:24:50 -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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