Paul HittandClaude Opus 5
f6f2fbd283
Completing the four sites the previous commit named rather than leaving them. 🔴 **Stories were CLOBBERED by a failed fetch, not merely mis-described.** Both `refreshStories` and the poll loop did `runCatching { current.stories() }.getOrDefault(emptyList())` and then wrote that straight into state — so one hiccup emptied the strip the user was looking at, and the poll repeated it on every tick. A poll that cannot reach the relay has learned nothing, and nothing is not "no stories". Both now keep what is on screen and skip that tick. ⚠️ Groups, both platforms. Android rendered NOTHING for an empty list — no guidance and no way to tell "you have no groups" from "the list did not load". It now says which, matching the contacts card. iOS already had copy and it had the same flaw: `refreshGroups` uses `try?`, so a failure left the list empty and the section confidently said "No groups yet. Start one with your buddies." `groupsLoaded` gates that on both sides. That shape is worth naming, because it produced three separate findings today: a swallowed failure, written into state, rendered as a confident empty state. The group DECODE bug hid inside it for months — groups were invisible on iOS and working on Android, and nothing anywhere said a word. Android 194 tests green, iOS 46 green. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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.