Paul Hitt
d8df4a8dbf
**android#19 — sign-in sat for four minutes and said nothing.** The failure path was always correct: anything `authenticate` throws is reported. What it could not report was a call that never RETURNS — observed 2026-09-05 with the requests demonstrably going out and the screen unchanged. Nothing was thrown, so nothing was shown. ⚠️ Sixty seconds, not ten. Sign-in derives a key from the passphrase and then talks to two services; an emulator or an older handset is legitimately slow at the first part. This is a backstop for "never", not a latency budget. **android#6 — a failed key-log append was permanent.** `signIn` calls `registerDevice`; `restore` did not. So a device registers exactly once, and if the transparency-log append did not land — a slow write, a relay mid-restart — it stays registered with no leaf, and every peer that enforces the log refuses it forever with an error that reads as an accusation of tampering. Relaunching did not help, which is the cruel part: the one thing anybody would try was the one thing that could not work. Restore now checks for a leaf and republishes if there is none. ⚠️ Checks first. Registering unconditionally would publish twenty fresh prekeys every launch and churn the log for nothing — iOS's `registerDeviceIfNeeded` tops up only when low for the same reason. Silent on failure, because this repairs a state almost nobody is in. **android#17 — a photo sent as a file keeps its GPS.** Same as ios#69 and the same answer: the picker strips through ImagePrep and MediaScrub, `Session.sendFile` passes the vault's bytes straight through, and the send screen now says which path you are on rather than leaving the safer one looking like a shortcut.
Flamenet Messenger — Android
The Android app, and the two libraries under it.
engine/ the protocol: X3DH, Double Ratchet, sealed sender, safety numbers,
key transparency. Plain Kotlin/JVM — no Android in it at all.
client/ the relay transport: HTTP, auth, the §8 routes.
app/ the Compose app.
interop/ the cross-engine driver; not shipped.
engine and client are deliberately plain JVM libraries. The protocol has
nothing to do with Android, and keeping it off the platform means their tests
run anywhere a JVM does — no SDK, no emulator, no device, which is also what
lets them gate in CI on Linux:
./gradlew :engine:test :client:test
The app's own unit tests need the Android SDK but still no emulator (Robolectric):
./gradlew :app:testDebugUnitTest
Where it stands
PARITY.md is the definition of done for this app — read that, not this. Every row there names the iOS file it came from so it can be re-checked rather than trusted. Headlines as of 2026-08-28: messaging, groups, attachments, voice notes, stories, calls, sealed sender, key transparency and the encrypted vault are built and tested; a cross-platform round trip against iOS was verified on 2026-08-26.
⚠️ This file said "Nothing here is an app yet" until 2026-08-28, above a tree containing the finished app — the README described the repository as it was when the engine landed and nothing updated it as the app grew around it. If a claim here ever disagrees with PARITY.md or with the tree, believe those, and fix this.
Why the engine came first, and is held to the vectors
An Android client needs the protocol implemented a third time, and the 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 is held to
test/vectors/protocol-v1.json in
flamenet-e2e — the same file the
other two engines are checked against, read from that repository rather than
copied here, because a copied vector file drifts and a drifting vector file
stops being a check. PublishedVectorsTest looks for it beside this checkout
and fails loudly if it cannot find it; FLAMENET_VECTORS overrides the search.
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.
Contributing and security
- CONTRIBUTING.md — building (JDK 21,
JAVA_HOMEis not optional on a Mac), the test gate, and the platform traps that cost an hour each. - PARITY.md — what iOS does, what this does, and what is left. It is the definition of done for this app.
- SECURITY.md — threat model and where to send a vulnerability report. Not an issue tracker matter: security@flamenetmessenger.com.