v27.161

This is a stable release in the v27.159 series, with cherry-picked
changes including a critical bug fix.

Highlights for users

• Fixed issue that could cause a persistent white screen at startup. (#4587)

Highlights for developers

• Added a React "error boundary" so that white-screen failures show an error message and stack trace.

sha256sum -c <<EOF
62e2a439f45f294312d7af9134d8fcf36e2927e2cf21a90bcbbcfa00774bbe19  app-release.apk
2f22c398bbf67a09b456d09159fc01403122ef45f7c2a0155699c781a1f0b16b  app-release.aab
EOF

v27.160

This was an Android-only release, with a cherry-picked fix atop v27.159.

Highlights for users

• (Android) Fixed issue causing notifications not to arrive. (#4560)

sha256sum -c <<EOF
b588bc2375a1b9f6dffc8da64c07b6da87a630bcbbc60102fd84da2ec815998c  app-release.apk
7252d547eafe970ecf700b16b5dc4df33ed6b8ab7817ff9918445c7fc79948e5  app-release.aab
EOF

v27.159

Highlights for users, vs v27.157 (last prod release)

• Fixed crash which affected some users at startup. (#4453)
• (iOS) Viewing a conversation now takes you to the right point in the history, including the first time. (#3457, #4357)
• (iOS) Scrolling through lots of messages is now fast. (#3557)
• The PM-conversations tab now shows many more conversations. (#3133)
• Support the Zulip "spoilers" feature. (#4155)
• People's avatars now show up crisply, without pixelation. (#4305)

Plus, like every release, many other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for users, vs v27.158 (last beta)

• Fixed crashes which affected some users at startup. (#4453, #4458)
• Fixed crash in previous version on certain @-mentions. (#4422)
• The PM-conversations tab now shows many more conversations. (#3133)

Plus, like every release, many other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

• Upgraded to React Native v0.63 -- the current latest version! (#4245)

• We've significantly refactored how we handle navigation, aiming to make it simpler and better support changes we want to make. This came in PRs #4443, #4441, #4440, #4428, #4430, following PR #4393 which upgraded us to React Navigation v5 (issue #4296). More to come.

• Improvements to our data structures continue:

  • Most uses of emails to identify users have been switched to user IDs. (PR #4424; mostly completes #3764)
  • state.messages is an Immutable.Map. (#4390)
  • Our various Redux sub-reducers now receive the global Redux state, allowing us to optimize some algorithms and drop some hacks we'd had for partial versions of the same thing. (PR #4437)
  • User IDs have a distinct UserId type: simply number at runtime, but the type-checker tracks the distinction. (PR #4421)

• Sentry error reports didn't include the Zulip server version in the case of uncaught exceptions; now they do. (PR #4493)

• Development on Windows was broken, and works again. (#4297)

• We have new, detailed instructions for profiling and benchmarking the app. (PR #4314)

• Resolved issues (latest to earliest): PR #4485, PR #4493, #4453, #4458, #4460, #4405, #4469, PR #4467, #4449, #4267, #4083, #4245, #4422, #4369, #4296, #4401, #4297, #4232, #4306, #3133, #4385.

sha256sum -c <<EOF
3d787a299d6ed5dc3892c846b7910e5c17853fa971ffe4bee38cef9cd3bbfbce  app-release.apk
212c6451351eb8b4eaea9255603068d180475f414a211fed4c2655f7093adfb9  app-release.aab
EOF

v27.158

Highlights for users

• (iOS) Viewing a conversation now takes you to the right point in the history, including the first time. (#3457, #4357)
• (iOS) Scrolling through lots of messages is now fast. (#3557)
• Support the Zulip "spoilers" feature. (#4155)
• People's avatars now show up crisply, without pixelation. (#4305)

Plus, like every release, many other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

• The representation of narrows, and particularly of PM conversations, has been greatly refactored. It should now be much simpler to write and understand code dealing with them, and especially to write it without introducing subtle bugs. (PRs #4382, #4368, #4364, #4361, #4356, #4346, #4342, #4339, #4335, #4332, #4330)

  • A new Narrow type straightforwardly follows the structure of the information we're representing, in place of the old data structures which mirrored the wire format for the much more complex get-messages API of the server. (PRs #4346, #4342, #4339)
  • PM conversations are represented with the users' IDs, not emails. (PR #4382, PR #4346)
  • The recipient module offers a suite of functions for explicitly translating between the remaining different ways that different data structures encode PM conversations. (#4035, PR #4356, PR #4335, PR #4332)

• We now use GitHub Actions for our CI, instead of Travis CI. This should be a much more stable platform; it's faster (builds take about 8-9 minutes, vs. 9-12 minutes on Travis); and it may also help us make it run faster still and produce clearer output. (#4174)

• Sentry error reports now include the Zulip server version. (#3745)

• Developer scripts now support NixOS (by using #!/usr/bin/env.) (PR #4366)

• Resolved issues (latest to earliest): #4388, PR #4387, #4155, #4174, PR #4373, #4357, #3457, PR #4367, PR #4366, PR #4350, #4035, #3557, #2750, #4338, #4157, #4305, #4307, #3745.

sha256sum -c <<EOF
85028b5037e97306f5f488ef9dcd9a69ef613602950b23d6978fa8e70c54d9a1  app-release.apk
cf3080568b9c179a2c919ec2cd0df7d9185ecdfbd789b55b4a623db0417e6db6  app-release.aab
EOF

v27.157

Highlights for users

• Fixed several bugs related to opening a notification. (#4290, #4293, PR #3922)

Plus, like every release, many other fixes and improvements for your
Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

• We no longer tie in our navigation with Redux; we no longer use react-navigation-redux-helpers. (#3804)
• Bumped targetSdkVersion to 29, aka Android 10. (#3665)
• Dropped iOS 10 support; now iOS 11+. (c953bc3)
• Resolved issues (latest to earliest): #4303, #4298, #4301, #3804, #4293, #3324, #4290, PR #3922, #3665, #2756 (at 78a62b2), #4281, #4100.

sha256sum -c <<EOF
bf85768e98cc99a911d91c186655dda69857e5dc3fc62a9892a01243ead50cc4  app-release.apk
a7c67683a6ccf9f60842c2eeb1732cfdf22e095e389c709cb3e7d23b988a1183  app-release.aab
EOF

v27.156

• Fixed crashes in 27.155. (#4270, #4275)

Notes for v27.155 copied below for convenience:

27.155 (2020-09-23)

Highlights for users

• Added support for the new "timezone-aware times" in messages that mention them. (#4162)
• Animated GIFs work again (broken in last release.) (#4212)

Plus, like every release, many other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

• #3782: Upgraded to RN v0.62!
• #3649, #4248: Upgraded to react-navigation v4, from v2.
• a0d8383: Experimental support for building an Android App Bundle instead of a single APK.

Hashes (for v27.156)

sha256sum -c <<EOF
6a686eea0b1dbd3e913317b8270702c08480119c89945198599d7dd4501da77f  app-release.apk
88a4810388d829bd57c4604b37a4853d190e7e4df8125631dc727db36290f7f6  app-release.aab
EOF

27.154

Highlights for users

• Updated icons for the new Zulip logo. (#4200)

Plus, like every release, other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

• #4151: Upgraded to RN v0.61!
• PR #4204: New script tools/run-android to replace react-native run-android, which turns out to have never quite worked correctly (even with the hacks we'd had to try to help it.)

sha256sum -c <<EOF
e0e2163bf1d30a004f94cfd4859f67f19adece4a7a6563add7a0495b194866a2  app-release.apk
EOF

26.30.153

Highlights for users

• You can now sign in with an Apple ID. (#3964)

Plus, like every release, other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

• #4180: Added logging for the message-list WebView taking a long time to load.

sha256sum -c <<EOF
37ac6388d8a0a41d0efd6ce06ec13ef2e257f7e223d7c8d096336f0cdfeb254b  app-release.apk
EOF

26.29.152

Highlights for users

• (Android) Fixed bug in downloading an image from a message. (#3124)
• (Android) Fixed bug in viewing a file attached to a message. (#3303)

Plus, like every release, other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

(Note that although #3124 and #3303 are related, and the news on both is for Android users only, their status on iOS differs: with #3124 the bug was Android-only, but with #3303 a second bug #4136 still stands in the way on iOS.)

• #3548: Upgraded to RN v0.60!
• #4026: Started using RN's new "autolinking" feature.
• PR #3852: Updated to use AndroidX.
• #3809: Resumed uploading to Sentry the info it needs to interpret stack traces.
• #4081: Added a URL polyfill; prefer this over trying to handle URLs as strings.

sha256sum -c <<EOF
2b7098a99730b361e86e1f0ec3309e545f861cd8f21a1b7cb60805d6a2c60d1d  app-release.apk
EOF

26.28.151

Highlights for users

• Fixed longstanding issue that caused the message list to scroll slightly back from the end. (#3301)
• Fixed issue causing profile icon to show as blank when first logging into an account. (#4077)

Plus, like every release, other fixes and improvements for your Zulip experience.

Highlights for developers

(With this version we return to shorter "highlights" summaries. For a complete list of changes, see git log as always.)

• #3950, PR #4047: We now customize how our Redux state is serialized for storage, which means we can begin to keep data structures of our choice in Redux.

sha256sum -c <<EOF
88f9700ff95026a1f2232105e47e8ee41e478e650a706c12e57fc7796b2fbe0d  app-release.apk
EOF