January 2025 releases // gomuks android

Most bridges didn't have any significant changes over the holidays, so only Signal and Twitter have new releases. I accidentally became an Android developer and made a GeckoView wrapper for gomuks web.

Megabridge progress

Most bridges didn't have any notable changes over the holidays, so I decided to skip their releases. However, Signal had some breaking changes which necessitated a release, and the Twitter bridge had multiple bugfixes worth releasing too.

Beeper is currently focusing on shipping the existing megabridges as local bridges, so there probably won't be much progress on the remaining rewrites until March or April.

gomuks web

As with the last 2 months, gomuks web received a bunch of new features. Contributors this time included @nexy7574, @sumnerevans, and @everypizza1

gomuks android

Last month gomuks web got some small changes for mobile optimization, which ended up making it quite a good mobile client. The obvious next step was to add push notifications and other integrations with native features.

I was initially considering using web push to keep it as a pure web app. However, Firefox and iOS browsers don't support all the fancier options for notifications, and even the fancy options in Chrome aren't as good as a native app. Therefore, I decided to make a native wrapper app which uses GeckoView for the web side, while handling push notifications from FCM natively in Kotlin.

The app can be found in the gomuks/android repo. It doesn't have any precompiled builds yet, but should work to some extent if you build it yourself. It can already receive notifications as well as auto-dismiss them when they're read from another device. The next features I'm planning to add are showing media and avatars in notifications and then providing a share target to send media using the OS share feature.

For now, gomuks android requires the backend to run elsewhere, because that's how I use it. In the future, there may be an option to run a backend bundled with the app. The backend running 24/7 allows notifications to be fully reliable with minimal battery usage. All information is sent in an encrypted FCM payload, which means the app doesn't need to fetch extra data to display notifications.

User styles

Custom CSS is already supported, but this month gomuks web's custom CSS feature gained support for @import statements. To make such statements easier to use, I made a simple service where user styles can be shared: css.gomuks.app.

New features

A mostly complete list of new features in gomuks web:

• Spaces
• Rendering read receipts
• Joining rooms (via link and accepting invites) and leaving rooms
• Sticker picker to complete MSC2545 support (custom emojis were already supported before)
• MSC4095 URL preview rendering
• MSC4144 per-message profile rendering
• Option for Discord-like compact replies
• Better message context menu for small screens (mobile)