Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

It has been a while since we got a newsletter out, and lots has been happening as we race towards our launch.

For those who have experienced the issue with Google Voice participants not showing up properly in our MMS group texting stack, we have a new stack in testing right now.  Let support know if you want to try it out, it has been working well so far for those already using it.

If you check your account settings for the “refer a friend” option you will now see two kinds of referral code.  The list of one-time use codes remains the same as always: a free month for your friend, and a free month’s worth of credit for you if they start paying.  The new code up in the top is multi-use and you can post and share it as much as you like.  It provides credit equivalent to an additional month to anyone who uses it on sign up after their initial $15 deposit as normal, and then a free month’s worth of credit for you after that payment fully clears.

We mentioned before that much of the team will be present at FOSSY, and we can now reveal why: there will be a conference track dedicated to XMPP, which we are helping to facilitate!  Call for proposals ends May 14th. Sign up and come out this summer!

For quite some time now, customers have been asked while registering if they would like to enable others who know their phone number to discover their Jabber ID, to enable upgrading to end-to-end encryption, video calls, etc.  The first version of this feature is now live, and users of at least Cheogram Android and Movim can check the contact details of anyone they exchange SMS with to see if a Jabber ID is listed.  We are happy to announce that we have also partnered with Quicksy to allow discovery of anyone registered for their app or directory as well.

Jabber-side reactions are now translated where possible into the tapback pseudo-syntax recognized by many Android and iMessage users so that your reactions will appear in a native way to those users.  In Cheogram Android you can swipe to reply to a message and enter a single emoji as the reply to send a reaction/tapback.

There have been two Cheogram Android releases since our last newsletter, with a third coming out today.  You no longer need to add a contact to send a message or initiate a call.  The app has seen the addition of moderation features for channel administrators, as well as respecting these moderation actions on display.  For offensive media arriving from other sources, in avatars, or just not moderated quickly enough, users also have the ability to permanently block any media they see from their device.

Cheogram Android has seen some new sticker-related features including default sticker packs and the ability to import any sticker pack made for signal (browse signalstickers.com to find more sticker packs, just tap “add to signal” to add them to Cheogram Android).

There are also brand-new features today in 2.12.1-5, including a new onboarding flow that allows new users to register and pay for JMP before getting a Jabber ID, and then set up their very own Snikket instance all from within the app.  This flow also features some new introductory material about the Jabber network which we will continue to refine over time:

Notifications about new messages now use the conversation style in Android.  This means that you can set seperate priority and sounds per-conversation at the OS level on new enough version of Android.  There is also an option in each conversation’s menu to add that conversation to your homescreen, something that has always been possible with the app but hopefully this makes it more discoverable for some.

For communities organizing in Jabber channels, sometimes it can be useful to notify everyone present about a message.  Cheogram Android now respects the attention element from members and higher in any channel or group chat.  To send a message with this priority attached, start the message body with @here (this will not be included in the actual message people see).

This release also brings an experimental prototype supporting WebXDC.  This is an experimental specification to allow developers to ship mini-apps that work inside your chats.  Take any *.xdc file and send it to a contact or group chat where everyone uses Cheogram Android and you can play games, share notes, shopping lists, calendars, and more.  Please come by the channel to discuss the future of this technology on the Jabber network with us.

To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

• The chatroom remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser or from Matrix.
• The blog, where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim.
• The Lemmy Community
• The Subreddit
• On Twitter

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

One feature people ask about from time to time is stickers.  Now, “stickers” isn’t really a feature, nor is it even universally agreed what it means, but we’ve been working on some improvements to Cheogram Android (and the Cheogram service) to make some sticker workflows better, released today in 2.12.1-3.  This post will mostly talk about those changes and the technical implications; if you just want to see a demo of some UI you may want to skip to the video demo.

Many Android users already have pretty good support for inserting stickers (or GIFs) into Cheogram Android via their keyboard.  However, as the app existed at the time, this would result in the sender re-uploading and the recipient re-downloading the sticker image every time, and fill up the sending server and receiving device with many copies of the same image.  The first step to mitigating this was to switch local media storage in the app to content-addressed, which in this case means that the file is named after the hash of its contents.  This prevents filling up the device when receiving the same image many times.

Now that we know the hashes of our stored media, we can use SIMS to transmit this hash when sending.  If the app sees an image that it already has, it can display it without downloading at all, saving not only space but bandwidth and time as well.  The Cheogram service also uses SIMS to transmit hashes of incoming MMS images for this purpose as well.

An existing Jabber client which uses the word “stickers” is Movim.  It wouldn’t make sense to add the word to our UI without supporting what they already have.  So we added support for XHTML-IM including Bits of Binary images.  This also relies on hash-based storage or caching, which by now we had.  This tech will also be useful in the future to extend beyond stickers into custom emoji.

Some stickers are animated, and users want to be able to send GIFs as well, so the app was updated to support inline playback of animated images (both GIF and WebP format).

Some users don’t have any sticker support in their keyboard or OS, so we want to provide some tools for these users as well.  We have added the option to download some default sticker packs (mostly curated from the default set from Movim for now) so that users start with some options.  We also built a small proxy to allow easily importing stickers intended for signal by clicking the regular “add to signal” links on eg signalstickers.com.  Any sticker selected from these will get sent without even uploading, saving time and space on the server, and then will be received by any user of the app who has the default packs installed with no need for downloading, with fallbacks for other clients and situations of course.

If a user receives a sticker that they’d like to save for easily sending out again later, they can long-press any image they receive and choose “Save as sticker” which will prompt them to choose or create a sticker pack to keep it in, then save it there.  Pointing a sticker sheet app or keyboard at this directory also allows re-using other sticker selection UIs with custom stickers saved in this way.

Taken together we hope these features produce real benefits for users of stickers, both with and without existing keyboard support, and also provide foundational work that we can build upon to provide custom emoji, thumbnails before downloading, URL previews, and other rich media features in the future.  If you’d like to see some of these features in action, check out this short video.