Broadcast Channels, Round Video Messages, Call Handoff and Android 7 Support
This is the biggest update we have shipped. Broadcast channels are the headline, but the change most people will feel is that DChat now runs on a lot more phones than it did last month.
- Broadcast channels, with reactions, view counts and subscriber management
- Round video messages, recorded inside the chat
- Move a call in progress from one of your devices to another
- A new call engine, and group calls that actually ring everyone
- Android 7.0 and newer, down from Android 11
Broadcast channels
You can now create a channel and post to any number of subscribers. Channels are one-to-many: you write, everyone who subscribed reads, and only the people you appoint can post.
Posts speak as the channel rather than as you, and they carry view counts and reactions. You can edit a post after publishing it, pin one to the top, and mute a channel you follow without leaving it. Channels have their own photo, an info page with subscriber and staff management, and they turn up in the same search box you already use for chats.
Official DChat announcements now arrive through a real broadcast channel rather than a special-cased conversation.
Round video messages
Hold the composer button to record a short round video and send it without leaving the conversation. Capture happens inline rather than handing you off to the system camera, so recording, reviewing and sending is one gesture.
Your call follows you between devices
A call in progress can be moved from one of your devices to another. Start on your phone, hand it to your tablet, keep talking.
Underneath, calls now run on a native WebRTC engine. That is the reason connections hold up better, reconnect faster when the network drops, and stop hanging in Connecting. Group calls also got a serious pass: they ring people who were offline when the call started, they no longer keep ringing after a decline, and a phone that cannot encode H264 will no longer break video for everyone else in the room.
DChat now runs on Android 7
The minimum supported version has dropped from Android 11 to Android 7.0. If DChat refused to install on your phone before, try again.
This one is the least visible and the most consequential. A private messenger that only runs on recent hardware is not private for anyone who cannot afford recent hardware, and a large share of the people who need this kind of app most are on exactly the phones we were excluding.
Faster, and steadier
App startup is significantly quicker: the interface is now compiled ahead of time at build time instead of being parsed every time the app launches. Two background loops that were quietly burning a full CPU core have also been tracked down and stopped.
The video player and viewer were rebuilt from scratch, which fixes playback stalling, wrong durations, and videos that would not open at all. Messages you send while offline now sit in a durable queue and retry properly instead of failing quietly.
Also in this update
Group privacy controls and a redesigned group info page with member search. Invite link fixes and who-reacted lists in groups. Notification delivery options, and push that wakes the app even when it is not running. An open source licenses page in About. Search now finds people by handle straight from the chat list.
Security: group sender-key handling, role authorization and authority verification were all hardened, and the recovery phrase is no longer written to the device log in clear text.
Go make a channel.
The DChat Team