With the delay in NU5 on main-net, Nighthawk Wallet team would need to adjust the Milestone and deliverables. As promised in our last update, we have been maintaining the live status of development at https://nighthawkwallet.com/changelog/
In April this year, in line with the prospective July/August launch of NU5, we had planned the launch for UAs to be undertaken in Milestone 2/3, but it is clear now that only the Test-net will be available in Q4 2021 with Main-net launch in Q1 2022. While this delay would give us extra time to refine on UA support and testing before the Q1 readiness, but it will delay our final deliverable flowing in to Q1 22’.
With the extra cycles available in Q4, I have requested @ZcashGrants to review us undertake working on much needed areas to improve on the wallet:
- Improve automated & manual testing across various devices and
- Adding easy ZEC purchase support. I have started communication with moonpay.io which can process KYC & Payments so the purchases will be taken care by them, supporting many countries, but not US per their policy
- Additionally, we can focus on developing the designs with Matt for faster iterations and implementation starting with Android. iOS app redesign update might take longer as the Swift UI framework is very new and it would require diligent coding to bring Matt’s designs to life.
Additionally, I would like to share a short retro for Milestone 2:
What went well
- F-Droid launch with no anti-features, setting up automated release publishing. Great feedback from the Unlocked Droid community to have a dedicated, Google-free wallet for Zcash.
- We even got a mention by a Professor from Germany when comparing privacy coins.
And Naomi Brockwell’s feature on Zcash!
- Purchase of devices & computers for the team to improve security when developing software and improve debugging.
- Shipped a bonus feature on Android to export wallet seed words to a password protected PDF for easy backup.
- Shipped Android URI DeepLink & QR code scan for easy of UX when interacting with ZecPages or ZIP-321 compatible services.
- Fixed test-net variant breakage in zcash-android-wallet-sdk repo upstream.
- Increase in testing and review for shipping bug free native apps.
- Got introduced to a research opportunity of building a privacy preserving retrieval of transaction info, this is fresh research and sounds very promising for the future of privacy in light clients.
- Reviewing possibility of Thorchain integration in Nighthawk wallet for easy to use swaps.
- With several bug fixes and support for Android 12 & iOS 15, our users are happier, require less support - we went from 4-5 support requests per week in July to 0/1 per week at the end of September while app downloads keep increasing beyond 1000 for both Google Play & Apple App Store each. Nighthawk users contact us via a combination of twitter, protonmail & z2z messages.
- Take active part in code reviews of upstream wallet & SDK repos.
- The bi-weekly Native Mobile Light Client Working Group calls have been going well with transparent updates available at GitHub - zcash/lcwg: Light Client Working Group project management repository (Thanks to following Hudson’s model from ETH cat herders calls)
What didn’t go well
- Both iOS devs were down with COVID-19 causing a slippage of feature deliverables of Deep Linking/QR code scan & PIN code for app entry for Nighthawk on iPhone. These features were successfully shipped on the Android version to both Play Store & F-Droid.
- Delays in the fast syncing algorithm integration - we are in close contact with ECC who are exploring an optimal solution for faster sync.
- Translations work is delayed to Milestone 3 as the Lingohub rates for languages we plan to support increased by 3 times, which was out of our budget and not practical as the service package is a monthly payment in to perpetuity. We are now in the process of shifting to using crowdin.com platform for crowdsourced translations.
- Flexa SDK integration work is also on a back burner as Flexa team is focussing on their own app and roadmap while delaying the release of their Spend SDK. Spend SDK · Flexa Developer