Paul HittandClaude Opus 4.8
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The relay can charge a few seconds of arithmetic before an account exists — cheap for one person, expensive for a farm, and unlike a CAPTCHA it hands nothing to a third party. This is the Android half, matching the iPhone app. Asked for only when the relay refuses without one, so a relay with the feature off — every relay running today — still sees exactly one request. Rethrown rather than swallowed when this app cannot answer: a difficulty above the cap leaves it genuinely unable to sign up here, and "update the app" is then the true sentence. Two refusals get their own sentences. challenge_required means the app is behind its server; challenge_failed is nearly always a challenge that expired while somebody was typing. Sharing one message would send half these people to the Play Store for nothing. Decided by the relay's code, never the status, because a 400 is also a bad email. The bit counting is pinned to exact vectors. A byte-counting implementation still SATISFIES a 9-bit difficulty — it overshoots to 16 and does 230x the work — so an assertion about "at least 9 leading zeros" cannot see the bug. Refs flamenet-relay#39 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.