Retroshare for Android – Update 3 – Final

GSoC 2019 is coming to an end and for this reason it is unfortunately my last blog post on freifunk. For this reason, I would like to start by thanking the freifunk community, Google and, in particular, my mentors for the opportunity to participate in this rather special program. In this post I will present what has been done, what has not worked out and what is still to be done.

Code and APK

You can find the application code at my github repository:
https://github.com/kdebiec/GSoC_2019
And the application itself, ready to use here:
https://github.com/kdebiec/GSoC_2019/releases/tag/GSoC_2019_final
(Please note that you need the “Retroshare Service/Core” application in order for the application to work properly. – backend application that you can build from the Retroshare repository: https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare)

Overview

The aim of my project as I mentioned in my first post is to build a mobile application oriented around the chat, with a big focus on the modern look. The new logo, which is also part of this project, was intended to reflect new direction of this software.

Logo

Below you can see the new Retroshare logo, which is the main logo for this application, and in other projects its use will depend on the acceptance by users and the profile of the project.

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App

I have posted my proposed design in this post. Now it’s time to show off final design, but it is difficult to describe the appearance of the application and it makes little sense to paste several screens here. Because of this I recorded a walkthrough of the application. You can check it out here:

Illustrations of empty screens are provided by Icons8. Thanks for them!

Application was fully written in Dart using Flutter. This should ensure relative code readability, an optional ability to port the code to iOS, and relatively fast application performance.

Features

Functionalities that are now available in the application:

• add friend via certificate and share ours,
• create with avatar, change and delete our identities,
• see friends locations,
• create public room (lobby),
• send and receive message,
• add and remove contact
• search for chats, contacts, people,
• discover public rooms,
• see rooms participants,
• signin, signup;

Roadmap

There are still many interesting things to do in this project and for this reason I intend to continue my work. In particular, I would like to focus on these features:

• Make a good use of and improve Retroshare’s Json api event system. This will enable app to have message notifications and optimize its performance.
• Bundle backend and frontend into one app. Current system is confusing and leaves much to be desired. Who wants to manage the process themselves that is still in the background anyway?
• Explore possibility to add tor option as it is in Retroshare desktop app.
• Improve chat backend, especially much needed storage of history.
• After merging Retroshare’s short certs, add QR code as a default way to add friends. This will involve redesigning the way it works now.
• At this point, user still have to be aware of how Retroshare works under the hood. Future improvements have to be made so user will have to only operate with identities. For example, now, after adding friend we have to yet find his identity in search box to add him to contact and finally after those steps we can message him.
• The website is already a bit outdated and it could use a new look. As soon as the application is ready, I would like to refresh website.
• As you can see on video, rooms name are also ‘Error’, which of course is not the name of room. Due to lack of native support of 64int in Dart, lobbies ids can’t be loaded and so does names. Thanks to my mentor, Gio, solution is already in PR, and after merge, some minor changes have yet to be done on frontend side.

Conclusion

During this program I tried to build a very good application base that can be further developed, which I hope will make futher improvements easy. Unfortunately, during this period I was not able to meet all the milestones, specifically, the chat backend has not been improved. In spite of everything, I intend, according to my Roadmap, to improve the chat backend as well as add more functions to the app so that it can be considered as a production version.

I encourage everyone, especially current Retroshare users, to test the new app. I hope you like it.

Once again, I would like to thank my mentors for their help in recent months.