August 2020

Aug. 27, 2020

August 2020

android  gnome  uprotocol

Announcing uprotocol and joining GNOME Challenge. Also, there are updates on CoolSocket!

This summer was eventful. We passed the first phase of GNOME Challenge; TrebleShot has become one of the most popular open-source file-sharing apps on Android; and I met many great people. I also published the roadmap for uprotocol1, a specification that aims to standardize file-sharing tools.

Also, last month, I made some changes to CoolSocket that should improve its reliability. One of the changes is the graceful cancellation feature, enabling both sides of the communication to become aware of cancellation requests. When used, the connection remains intact, and the two sides can still communicate after handling it. The only problem was the performance degradation caused by both sides needing to talk to each other all the time. To fix it, I made the reading side wait for 2048 operation cycles, and it worked.

Apart from that, TrebleShot became more popular after the Indian Government banned ShareIt and people started looking for alternatives. Many TrebleShot derivatives surfaced on Play Store, some of which not complying with the license. I am guessing this is usually the case with FOSS apps since only a small amount of people on Google Play care whether the software they use is FOSS or not.

Another good news is we passed the first phase of GNOME Challenge. The Open University Project is one of the twenty projects that did so. If it can make it to the third phase, it will be fun to work on.


  1. uprotocol, the open content-sharing standard.