New features and other improvements

Show collection-related notifications, and collection details

Mastodon 4.6 introduced Collections, allowing users to maintain shareable lists of accounts other accounts may wish to follow.

There’s a fair amount of work to do to follow support these in Pachli, and 3.8.0 ships the first part of the work.

If your account is added to a collection, or a collection your account is in is edited, you will receive a notification. Pachli 3.8.0:

• Shows these notifications
• Allows you to view the collection details (curator, description, other accounts in the collection)
• Allows you to remove your account from the collection

Tap the content area of the notification to view the content.

The collection curator may mark the collection as “sensitive”. Collections marked sensitive are blurred by default, unless the option “Account preferences > Always show sensitive content” is on. You can also blur a collection’s notification using the “eye” icon at the top right of the notification.

New accessibility actions have been added to operate on collections and collection notifications.

Future work will allow you to curate your own collections and view them in other contexts.

Add support for filters, search operators, quoting, on iceshrimp.net servers

Pachli now recognises the iceshrimp.net server software. If your server uses this software Pachli enables additional features.

• You can create and apply filters.
• The search UI supports additional filters for attachments, limiting by author and date.
• You can quote posts.

This work was done by Caitlin in #2387, her first contribution to Pachli.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt
• French by Terry L
• German by Kachelkaiser
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Latvian by Edgars Andersons
• Norwegian Nynorsk by Kraksen
• Slovak by Russssty
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Don’t crash if quote policy is missing

Returning to the post editor after doing something else could crash Pachli if your server didn’t support quoting. Fixed in #2393.

Remove cached following relationships when blocking a domain

Pachli keeps track of the accounts you follow to enable various anti-abuse features.

If you blocked a server the local information about any accounts you followed on the server wasn’t updated. So Pachli would continue to act as though you still followed the accounts when making anti-abuse decisions. This continued until the next Pachli cold-start (e.g., because your device restarted, or Android stopped Pachli).

This is fixed with #2381, ensuring information about these relationships is always updated.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.8.0 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Kabyle by ButterflyOfFire

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Don’t crash on corrupt notification data

Lucas Treffenstädt reported a crash (#2366) when Pachli was processing corrupt cached notification data. This is their first contribution to Pachli.

Fixed with #2368

Show data about the account being replied to in more cases

A header appears over posts to show why you’re seeing the post. If it’s a reply it’s supposed to say either

• “X replied to Y”

if Pachli has a cached copy of the account being replied to, or

• “X replied”

if Pachli doesn’t have those details

While investigating the previous issue I noticed this was only ever showing “X replied”, because the cached data wasn’t being used correctly. It’s a small thing, but this now works as intended (#2367).

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.7.2 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Chinese (Simplified Han script) by reducedradius (their first contributions to Pachli)
• Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt
• Finnish by Kalle Kniivilä
• French by Terry L
• German by vinz
• German by Kachelkaiser
• Indonesian by Doctorredits_here
• Indonesian by Arif Budiman (their first contributions to Pachli)
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Latvian by Edgars Andersons
• Polish by Łukasz Horodecki
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Show polls attached to boosted posts

Julie Moynat reported (#2316) that boosts of posts containing polls were not showing the poll.

Fixed with #2317.

Show roles on any suggested accounts

The list of Suggested accounts wasn’t showing any roles those accounts had.

Fixed with #2352.

Update “following” relationships when following suggested accounts

For some of Pachli’s anti-harassment controls (e.g., hiding conversations started by accounts you do not follow) Pachli maintains an on-device private database of the accounts you follow, and refreshes this periodically.

Following an account from the Suggested accounts screen wasn’t updating this database, so there was a window of time where you could be following an account, but it would be treated as un-followed by any of the anti-harassment features.

Fixed with #2350.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.7.1 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

New features and other improvements

Highlight hashtags you follow in posts

Pachli lets you follow hashtags like you follow accounts. Any post that contains one of the hashtags you follow will appear in your home timeline.

Sometimes though this can be confusing, especially if you follow many hashtags, it’s difficult to remember all of them, and you’re wondering why a particular post is in your timeline.

To make this easier Pachli now highlights hashtags you follow in posts in two ways.

1. If the post contains one or more hashtags you follow, and the post is not a boost or a reply, Pachli shows the first matching hashtag above the post, next to a # icon.
2. Any matching hashtags you follow in the post are shown in bold.

In this screenshot the account follows the #mastodev hashtag.

This feature was requested by NeatNit, Johan, and quaff.

Allow images to be zoomed 12x

When viewing an image attached to a post you can zoom in to the image by either double-tapping the image or pinch-zooming.

In both cases Pachli limited the maximum zoom to 3x the image size.

Now, after double-tapping you can continue to pinch-zoom the image up to a final zoom size of 12x.

This feature was requested by githubisviolatingthegpl in #2254.

Tap the thread title to jump to the top

Mister Don suggested that – in common with other lists of items in Pachli – tapping the title bar of a thread should jump the user to the top of the thread.

That’s been done.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Burmese by htet
• Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Latvian by Edgars Andersons
• Lithuanian by Vaclovas Intas (Vac31.)
• Russian by Yurt Page
• Slovak by Russssty
• Tamil by தமிழ்நேரம்

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Support Mastodon version X features on Hometown version X+n

Marielle Quinton reported that Pachli wasn’t allowing quoting on her server. Her server runs Hometown, a Mastodon fork, and Pachli wasn’t recognising that Hometown at version X+n supports the same features that Mastodon does at version X.

With that fixed (#2306) – and if your account is also on a server running Hometown – you will notice extra features in this release, including support for quotes and a better UI for search.

Hide preview cards on all posts with content warnings

Posts with content warnings are supposed to hide all content in the post unless you tap through to see the content. In a few cases the preview cards that appear when a post contains one or more links were not being hidden. This was reported by Julie Moynat in #2280, fixed in #2302.

Ensure first load of “With replies” tab starts from the top

OrntLaOkro reported a problem when viewing an account’s profile page – the “With replies” tab was always showing posts part way down the timeline instead of starting with their most recent posts. Fixed in #2308.

Editing posts

There are several fixes to the experience of creating and editing posts.

On large devices Pachli used to show the “Compose” interface as a dialog window over the timeline. This is unnecessary since it became possible to write multiple posts at once. It also triggered an Android bug in some devices that hid the description UI if you attached any media to a post. This bug was reported by rcr and Die Spastigerin. Fixed in #2310.

Dany reported a bug where the “scheduled time” of scheduled posts couldn’t be changed after scheduling the post. Fixed in #2310.

D.Hamlin.Music reported a bug where the “delete-and-redraft” functionality wasn’t working. Fixed in #2297.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.7.0 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

New features and other improvements

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Use the correct post visibility when replying

Julie Moynat reported (#2264) that when replying Pachli was not respecting the user’s default post privacy.

The intent is the privacy of the reply should be the more private of:

• The privacy setting of the post being replied to
• Your default post privacy setting

Pachli 3.6.0 inadvertently changed this behaviour to use just the privacy setting of the post being replied to. For example, if your default post privacy setting was “followers only” and you replied to a public post your reply’s privacy setting defaulted to “public”, instead of the correct “followers only”.

Fixed in #2275, with additional tests to ensure this does not regress.

Fix issue preventing deleting drafts and scheduled posts

Luchuco Cadáver reported a problem deleting drafts. Fixed in #2269, along with the same problem which could have caused problems deleting scheduled posts.

Displaying posts

Blockquotes and lists

A “blockquote” is when someone uses the blockquote HTML element in their post, not the “quote posts” feature. Normal Mastodon servers do not allow users to do this, but other servers on the Fediverse do. This text is an example of a blockquote.

Julie Moynat and Balthasa Reuter reported (#2265) display problems when a blockquote contained a list or the text in the quote was hyphenated.

Fixed with #2274 and #2277.

Displays mentions as links when the mention URL doesn’t match

Mauricio Teixeira and Ozoned reported a problem where some @-mentions in some posts weren’t linked / clickable.

This is a server bug (affecting at least snac2 and Bonfire) where @-mentions in the text are not associated with the correct link. In these cases Pachli was removing the link.

Pachli now keeps the link (#2263), so you can tap on the account name. This will open the account in your browser, which matches the behaviour of the Mastodon web UI.

Markdown rendering

If you use the Render Markdown experimental feature the rendering has been improved and some regressions have been fixed.

• LaTeX equations are shown again (#2267)
• Blockquotes are displayed similarly to when the “Render Markdown” option is off (#2276)
• pre and code elements in the post are displayed correctly (#2276)

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.6.1 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

New features and other improvements

Underline links for accessibility

Julie Moynat suggested (#2045, their first contribution to Pachli) it should be possible to underline links in posts to improve their accessibility.

This was implemented in #2247. You can now choose to underline any or all of:

• Links
• @-mentions
• #hashtags

in posts, with the new “Preferences > Underlined links” setting.

These screenshots show the before and after on a typical post.

Creating and managing “Drafts”

“Drafts” are posts you’ve written but haven’t sent yet. Also, if sending a post failed for some reason a copy is saved as a draft.

Mastodon doesn’t support this, so drafts are saved locally on your device until you’re ready to send them.

The user experience for creating and managing drafts has changed significantly in this release.

Accessing drafts

The “Drafts” entry on the main menu now shows you how many drafts are on your device (#2225)

If you frequently create and manage drafts you can now add the “Drafts” screen to a tab (just like “Notifications”, “Bookmarks”, etc) (#2250). This feature was suggested by @kaybee335@fosstodon.org in this Mastodon thread.

To do this use the “Add to tab” menu on the “Drafts” screen.

Or use “Account preferences > Tabs”.

Managing drafts

The previous UI for showing drafts showed each draft in a list with buttons to edit or delete the draft. This meant the tap-areas to edit a draft was quite small, and the button to delete a draft was next to the button to edit a draft, making it easy to accidentally delete a draft when you wanted to edit it.

When support for creating multiple posts at once was introduced it also became (inadvertently) possible to edit the same draft multiple times.

Now:

• Tap a draft to edit it.
• Tap the checkbox next to a draft to select it. You can select multiple drafts at once. When you do this the toolbar at the top of the screen shows you how many are selected and includes a menu to delete the selected drafts.

In this screenshot the user has selected the first two drafts, and tapped the “Delete” menu item at the top right. A dialog box to confirm deletion is displayed.

Sending indicator

While a draft is being sent it can’t be selected or edited. This is shown with a spinning progress indicator, replacing the checkbox.

Sending failures

Previously, if a draft couldn’t be sent Pachli would interrupt what you were doing (on some screens) to tell you the draft failed to send, and the drafts UI would tell you an error occurred.

Now:

• A normal Android notification is created to tell you a draft couldn’t be sent, irrespective of what Pachli screen you are on.
• These notifications are cleared when you open the “Drafts” screen.
• The specific error that occurred is shown under each draft. This information can be helpful to your server administrators if the error keeps happening.

Editing drafts

• Saving a draft remembers the cursor position, and restores it when you re-open the draft.
• A draft can only be edited in one screen. If the draft is already being edited it is shown with a “pencil” icon, and tapping the draft will switch to the in-progress edit of the draft, instead of editing it a second time.

In this screenshot the user has opened the second draft to correct the error in the content warning text. While editing the draft they have switched back to the list of drafts.

Creating and managing “Scheduled posts”

As the name suggests, “Scheduled posts” are posts you’ve written that will be sent at some time in the future.

If your server supports them you write one by setting the scheduling option when writing a post.

The UI for managing scheduled posts has been updated and is now consistent with the UI for managing drafts.

Specifically:

• The “Scheduled posts” screen can now be shown in a tab.
• Scheduled posts are deleted by selecting one or more of them and using the “Delete scheduled post” menu, just like Drafts.
• Tap a scheduled post to edit it. Tapping the same post multiple times switches to the existing editor instead of launching multiple editors, just like Drafts.
• Content warnings, attachments, and polls in scheduled posts are now shown.

This screenshot shows scheduled posts added to a tab (alongside the default Home, Notifications, Trending, and Conversations tabs). All scheduled posts are selectable, none are selected, and none are being edited.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt
• Finnish by Kalle Kniivilä
• French by Terry L
• German by Kachelkaiser
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Norwegian Bokmål by Sunniva Løvstad
• Polish by Łukasz Horodecki
• Slovak by Russssty
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla
• Tamil by தமிழ்நேரம்

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Encode user content that looks like HTML for display

@jandi@mastodon.social reported (#2180) account display names could contain HTML characters that Pachli wasn’t displaying. For example, @adriaProgrammer’s display name of </Antir> wasn’t displaying properly.

Fixed in #2245.

Display numbered lists and monospace text in posts

Julie Moynat reported (#2217) a problem displaying posts containing ordered lists (i.e., lists where each item starts with a number rather than a bullet).

R. L. Dane reported (thread) a similar issue displaying preformatted (monospace) text.

This was an issue with Android’s limited support for converting HTML for display.

Previously this wasn’t a problem because Mastodon only supported a subset of HTML elements, converting any others to that subset on the server.

This changed in Mastodon 4.2.0, but isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Mastodon 4.2.0 release notes.

Pachli now displays these properly.

These screenshots show the before (first) and after (second) display behaviour of an example post by R. L. Dane.

These changes went through a number of iterations and there was very helpful feedback from Pachli Current users, including:

• @dandrumheller@mstdn.social
• @bardmoss@autistics.life
• @mike@thecanadian.social
• @chrisn@mas.to
• @keefmarshall@mastodon.online

Set the attachment description text when viewing media

Juan M Sevilla reported (#2220) a bug where media descriptions were not always displayed when swiping through media. Fixed in #2239.

Don’t crash when updating media on an existing status

@jandi@mastodon.social and @keefmarshall@mastodon.online both reported a crash when editing a post.

The crashing code was never in a regular Pachli release, only Pachli Current. By using Pachli Current and reporting problems like this they’ve both helped improve Pachli for everyone else.

Fixed in #2230.

Don’t crash checking user’s sensitive media preference

A race condition could cause a crash when viewing an account’s posted media. Fixed with #2207.

Don’t crash when removing tabs from the end

Removing the end-most tab could cause a crash. Fixed with #2206.

Don’t crash when cropping account avatar or header images

Newer Android devices have additional security restrictions apps must follow when operating on files, and Pachli wasn’t doing this when cropping images if you were changing your account’s header or profile images. This was causing a crash, fixed with #2205.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.6.0 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

New features and other improvements

All notifications about a post now include action buttons

@wolfblade@mastodon.social noted some notifications about posts didn’t include action buttons (to reply, boost, etc). @fluchtkapsel@nerdculture.de also filed bug #2111 about this making it difficult to open notifications about posts that only contain attachments.

This was fixed in #2160.

TalkBack descriptions and actions for notifications

Notifications now have complete TalkBack descriptions, including:

• Notifications about a post use the post’s full description, prefixed with the notification’s type (mention, boost, poll ending, etc).
• Follow requests read the notification’s type, the account’s name and handle, and description.
• Moderation warnings read the full text of the notification.

TalkBack actions have been added for all notifications.

• Notifications about a post provide all the post actions (reply, boost, quote, etc).
• Follow requests provide actions to approve or reject the request.
• Moderation warnings have an action to view the warning.
• Report notifications have actions to open the report, and open the reporter and reportee profiles.
• Signup notifications have an action to open the profile.

This fixes issue #2047 reported by @aryan@dragonscave.space.

The initial work to do this had a bug reading descriptions for boosted posts. @aryan@dragonscave.space reported the problem and also submitted #2168 to fix it, their first code contribution to Pachli.

TalkBack and quotes

Posts containing a quote now read out the quote (#2158), fixing #2049 reported by @dhamlinmusic@dragonscave.space.

Mastodon adds extra content to posts containing a quote, this content is supposed to be hidden by clients that understand quotes, like Pachli. This extra content is now also removed from the TalkBack description (#2157).

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Dutch by lwgph (their first contributions to Pachli)
• Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt
• Finnish by Kalle Kniivilä
• French by Terry L
• German by Kachelkaiser
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Kabyle by ButterflyOfFire
• Latvian by ℂ𝕠𝕠𝕠𝕝
• Latvian by Edgars Andersons
• Polish by Łukasz Horodecki
• Slovak by Russssty
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla
• Tamil by தமிழ்நேரம் (their first contributions to Pachli)

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Talkback and posts

Testing the notification work showed Pachli was adding actions to open attachments even if the post didn’t contain any attachments. Fixed with #2155.

TalkBack was also reading descriptions for attachments and polls if the post had a content warning and the user had not expanded the post to view the content. Fixed with #2154.

Pachli 3.1.0 changed how posts were read out, moving the poster’s handle to earlier in the content’s description. Several people provided feedback that this was unhelpful, including Rene Ludwig @Clio09@digitalcourage.social and Woochancho @muchanchoasado@tkz.one, so this change has been reverted. The poster’s handle is now read towards the end of the post’s description.

Update tab contents when reordering tabs

@ArtsandSocks@ottawa.place reported (#2178) reordering tabs (using “Account preferences > Tabs”) updated the tab icons, but the content was not updated until restarting Pachli.

Fixed with #2181.

Prevent crash when viewing an account

A race condition could cause Pachli to crash when viewing an account. Fixed with #2175.

Prevent crash (maybe) when cropping images

Google Play data shows a spike in crashes when users crop images before posting. I haven’t been able to reproduce this, but #2172 might fix it.

Prevent cursor jumping around when editing attachment descriptions

@BryanGreyson@social.tchncs.de reported an issue (#2163) where the cursor could jump back to the start of the text when writing an attachment description, including a video demonstrating the problem, which was very helpful.

Fixed with #2169.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.5.0 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

New features and other improvements

Show hidden hashtags at the end of the content

As you probably know, the content of posts on Mastodon and similar servers can contain hashtags, and you can follow hashtags so all posts with the hashtag appear in your home feed.

Posts can also contain “hidden” or “out-of-band” hashtags. Mastodon doesn’t let you create posts with hidden hashtags, but other Fediverse software does – for example, Piefed.

If a post contains a hidden hashtag, and you follow the hashtag, the post will appear in your feed.

Previously, Pachli wasn’t displaying the hidden hashtags, which could cause confused users asking “Why is this post in my home feed?”.

Now, if there are any hidden hashtags Pachli appends a paragraph to the post containing all of them, so it’s still clear why your feed contains the post.

Feedback from NeatNit (@neatnit@fosstodon.org), Harald Hannelius (@harald@mementomori.social) prompted the work to fix this.

Search improvements

Show a count of active filters in the search filter badge

The badge on the “filter” icon when search filters are active now tells you how many different filters are active.

Searching for posts that quote other posts

Mastodon 4.4.5 and above supports limiting searches to only posts that quote or other posts (or only posts that don’t quote other posts).

If your account is on a server running Mastodon 4.4.5 or greater Pachli now shows this as an additional search filter.

When searching, tap the “filters” button and the “Quotes” option will appear at the right end of the second row. Tap this to open a dialog to choose from the possible options.

This screenshot shows this, and also highlights the filter badge when one other filter is already active.

Trust new intermediate certificates from Sectigo

If you use an Android 7 device you may have had problems connecting to some servers if the server’s security certificate was issued by Sectigo, as Android 7 refuses to connect.

This is similar to the problem with Let’s Encrypt certificates fixed with Pachli 2.5.0.

This problem was reported by Amélie Cornélis (@AmelieCornelis@freeradical.zone), and is fixed.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Chinese (Traditional Han script) by 黃冠霖 (their first contribution to Pachli)
• Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt
• French by Terry L
• German by Kachelkaiser
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Kabyle by ButterflyOfFire
• Latvian by Edgars Andersons
• Polish by Łukasz Horodecki
• Slovak by Russssty
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Don’t crash if a poll has a missing votesCount

D.Hamlin (@dhamlinmusic@dragonscave.space) reported problems loading posts containing polls missing the count of votes on the poll. This should be fixed with #2117.

Displaying posts with quotes

There was a lot of useful feedback about how Pachli displays quotes and related bugs which resulted in many fixes.

Don’t show quotes if the quoting post has a closed content warning

Jules (@blitter@mastodon.catgirl.cloud) and Sarah Peper (@jay_peper@chaos.social) both reported (#2037) that if a post quoted another post and had a content warning, Pachli was still displaying the quote if you hadn’t clicked through the content warning on the post that quoted it.

This breaks a boost-with-content-warning usage of quoted posts, and was fixed in #2098.

Handle quotes on Friendica/Akkoma servers

Kristian (@z428eu@quietmoon.org) and blit @blit@mastodon.ml both reported (#2043) problems loading posts containing quotes on servers running Friendica or Akkoma.

Both these platforms implemented quote support before Mastodon, and Mastodon’s implementation has re-used some of their work in an incompatible fashion.

Pachli now recognises this, and will display quotes correctly if you use a Friendica or Akkoma server (#2133).

Improve handling of “quote links”

Mastodon includes a “quote link” in posts containing a quote, for backwards compatibility with clients that do not support quotes.

In some cases Pachli was removing these links when it shouldn’t (reported by Nordnick (@nick@mammuthus.de), fixed in #2126), and some servers return those links wrapped in extra HTML elements, and Pachli now handles those too (#2137).

Show quotes in boosted posts

Mauricio Teixeira (@badnetmask@hachyderm.io) reported a problem where boosted posts containing a quote could cause a crash. He provided a detailed set of reproduction steps, which was very helpful in tracking down the problem. This was fixed in #2113.

Correctly show placeholder for blocked quotes

Kalle Kniivilä (@kallekn@mastodonsweden.se) reported #2052, where a post containing a quote you couldn’t see wasn’t showing the correct placeholder to indicate a quote was present.

This turned out to be both a bug in Pachli and a bug in Flipboard, where Flipboard was not correctly approving quotes. Both bugs have now been fixed (#2102 for Pachli, and by Gregory Scallan (@greg@flipboard.social) for Flipboard).

Media playback

Don’t auto-resume playback if the user scrubs media

Fluchtkapse (@fluchtkapsel@nerdculture.de) reported (#2112) pausing a video, scrubbing through the video to a new point, then stopping, caused the video to resume playing instead of remaining paused. Fixed with #2118.

Ensure media playback starts if there was no preview image

@TKb0iZ@sunny.garden reported audio files were loading without displaying the playback controls.

Further investigation showed this was happening with any media that didn’t display a preview image; typically audio files, but also video files if you had disabled media previews.

This was fixed with #2084

Pachli’s database

Pachli keeps a database of information it needs for normal operation on your device. A number of issues with this are fixed or improved in this release.

Trim database cache at startup if needed

Background

To operate efficiently Pachli keeps a database on your device, caching information you have received from your server; posts, how they relate to each other, how you have interacted with them (e.g., have you clicked through a post’s content warning?), etc.

This database is encrypted, associated with your account, and deleted when you remove your account from Pachli or when you delete Pachli. It is not accessible to other applications, and is never sent off your device (unless you have opted in to Google’s device backup, see the privacy policy for more).

Left untended, Pachli’s database on your device would grow without bounds.

To ensure this doesn’t happen, approximately every 12 hours, and if your device is idle, Pachli cleans the database, removing cached items no longer referenced from your cached timelines. This process typically takes a second or less.

Unfortunately, some Android manufacturers, in a quest to artificially inflate their battery performance numbers, aggressively prevent applications from performing any sort of background work.

Manufacturers known to do this include:

• Huawei
• Xiaomi
• OnePlus
• Samsung

and more (see Don’t kill my app!).

Before Pachli supported quotes this problem went unnoticed. Over time Pachli would take a bit longer to work on these devices, and would use more and more space, but it would still work. Because Pachli does not report any external telemetry it was not possible for the developers to proactively discover this was happening.

This also explains why notification delivery on these devices may be sporadic if you don’t use Unified Push. Android on these devices stops the periodic tasks Pachli launches to fetch new notifications.

This changed when Pachli supported quotes, as Pachli has to manipulate more data to do this. With the normal size of the database – a few hundred to a thousand posts – this is not a problem. However, if you have been using Pachli for a while on a device from one of these manufacturers you may have tens or even hundreds of thousands of cached posts.

Creating your home timeline – which should normally take milliseconds – could take multiple seconds, or even crash because Pachli needed more memory than was available.

People who reported these issues and helped with debugging include:

• arclight (@arclight@oldbytes.space)
• A Flock of Beagles (@burnitdown@beige.party)
• Irene (@irenetherogue@freesky.world)
• Kommadieb (@kommadieb@norden.social)
• langhaarschneider (@langhaarschneider@sueden.social)
• Luchuco Cadáver (@lufertec@mastodon.uy)
• MaMü (@mamue@norden.social)
• Matthew Booth (@mattb@hachyderm.io)
• neutronwrangler (@neutronwrangler@mastodon.org.uk)
• O Galdo (@pcgaldo@mastodon.pcgaldo.com)
• Radgryd (@Radgryd@mstdn.games)
• Sashin (@sashin@veganism.social)
• ScottMGS (@ScottMGS@justme.masto.host)
• ticho (@ticho@mas.to)
• Tomasz (@tomo@floss.social)

What Pachli does now

Every time you start Pachli it performs a quick check to see how many posts are cached. If it’s too many then the database is trimmed immediately.

This is a quick fix while I think of a better one.

What you can do

1. Don’t buy devices from these manufacturers in the future.
2. Open Don’t kill my app!, and click on the entry for your device’s manufacturer (e.g., Huawei’s page). You will see suggestions for settings you can change on your device that will, sometimes, fix the problem, at no cost to your effective battery life.

Ensure database migrations work when upgrading from very old versions

To support new features the structure of Pachli’s database is sometimes modified from one release to the next.

A bug caused those modifications to be missed if you were upgrading from a very old Pachli version (2.12.0 or older), causing a crash when the new version starts.

This was reported by Sebastian Wagner in #2062 and Florian Berger (@flberger@nerdculture.de) in #2119, and fixed with #2129.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.4.0 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Finnish by Kalle Kniivilä
• French by Terry L
• German by Kachelkaiser
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Latvian by Edgars Andersons
• Norwegian Nynorsk by Sunniva Løvstad
• Slovak by Russssty
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.3.1 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.

New features and other improvements

Allow multiple simultaneous “compose” tasks

The Android “Recents” screen shows you recently opened applications and allows you to quickly switch between them. You typically access it with the “square” navigation button, or by swiping up from the bottom of the screen if gesture-navigation is enabled.

More accurately, it shows your recent tasks. Most apps typically have a single task, but applications can create new tasks, and each task appears separately in the list. For example, the GMail app does this when you write new e-mails.

Pachli now does this too, creating a new task every time you create or edit a post.

This allows a number of new behaviours. For example:

• If you want to write a post that copies text from multiple posts you can start writing the post, then open the “Recents” list, switch back to your timeline, and copy text from other posts.
• You can have multiple posts open for writing simultaneously, and switch between them.

This screenshot shows the open “Recents” list after starting to write a post in Pachli. The “Compose” task is present, and just off the left of the screen you can see the Pachli task that contains the timeline.

This also fixes #1555 reported by anauta, where if you were in the middle of writing a post and tapped a Pachli notification the post you were writing was lost.

Updates to translations

Languages with updated translations are:

• Estonian by Priit Jõerüüt
• French by Terry L
• German by Kachelkaiser
• German by Thomas Cloer
• Irish by Aindriú Mac Giolla Eoin
• Latvian by Edgars Andersons
• Slovak by Russssty
• Spanish by Juan M Sevilla

If you would like to help improve Pachli’s translation in to your language there’s information on how you can contribute.

Significant bug fixes

Move the “Toot” button to top right

The UI changes to support writing quotable posts inadvertently caused a problem for people using Pachli on smaller screens. It was possible for the “Toot” button to be pushed partially off the screen.

This was reported by @frauxirah@chaos.social, and Jerome in #206.

To fix this the “Toot” button has been moved. It is now at the top right of the screen when writing a post, consistent with Android UX guidelines. The other controls at the top of the screen (to insert a #, @, or change the language) have been moved to the left. Your account’s avatar has moved to the “Posting as…” line.

These images show the UI before (left) and after (right) the changes on two different sizes of (simulated) device. The red arrows and boxes indicate which parts of the UI have moved and where they have moved to.

As well as making space on smaller devices it also makes it harder to press the “Toot” button by accident, as there are no other tappable bits of the UI nearby.

This Mastodon thread has more details about this change.

Don’t crash if bio of suggested account is empty

Mastodon’s “Account suggestion” feature can suggest accounts that don’t have a bio / description. Pachli wasn’t handling that case, and crashing.

Ignore quote, quote_update notifications with a missing post

A Mastodon bug can cause you to receive notifications that someone has quoted one of your posts, or a post you have quoted has been updated, without referencing the post in question. This is contrary to the Mastodon specification, so Pachli now ignores them (which also prevents a crash). There’s nothing useful Pachli can do with these notifications – for example, telling you that someone has quoted one of your posts, without being able to show you the post in question, is not helpful.

Show animated avatars in preview card bylines

The “byline feature”, introduced in Pachli 2.7.0, was showing the avatars of authors in the byline, but wasn’t animating those avatars (if appropriate). Now it does.

Prevent crash when scrolling through notifications

A bug in the Google library used for displaying lists of items (e.g., notifications) was occasionally causing a crash. This has been worked around, until Google releases a fix.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who took the time to report issues and provide additional followup information and screenshots.

Download Pachli 3.3.0 from Google Play, F-Droid, or the GitHub release page.