An update on TxtNet Browser development

[lukeaschenbrenner]

Hello all,

I wanted to provide a brief update about the work that has been done since the development hiatus and highlight some of the key additions in TxtNet 2.2.0. Finally, I'd like to look ahead at the long-term future of this project.

As you may be aware, it has been almost two years since the release of 2.1.4, which has been the latest release up until today. In that time, development crawled to a halt as I shifted to other priorities in life. I had always meant to continue support for the app, but a lack of clear vision for the app's future and many other responsibilities got in the way.
Recently, I was interested in picking up the app where I had left off with the hopes of at least targeting the newest Android SDK (35, aka Android 15) and fixing some minor bugs. In addition, I've finally set up the build process in the dependent library repo, BrotliLib, which has finally removed the need for .aar binaries in this project. Besides renaming the package name, this is the last major hurdle in the way to allowing upload of this project to F-Droid. Stay tuned!

This was a far more difficult endeavor than I had anticipated, but I'll cover some of the most notable changes to TxtNet Browser 2.2.0:

• Updated target SDK to 35
• Fixed edge-to-edge compatibility issues as a result of Android 15 changes
  • Android 15 introduced mandatory opt-in for edge-to-edge layouts, which their "internal surveys" found that more people liked. This meant that all apps without native support (eg. Compose, Material 3) will have to start using insets starting Android 16. Thankfully, they have included a partial opt-out flag for Android 15 but announced that when apps move to Android 16, this flag will no longer work. This means that a rewrite of the UI is sorely needed!
• Fixed horrible UI placement issues and invisible status bar as a result of edge-to-edge enforcement
• Switched from precompiled binary .aar to Maven repository-hosted solution
• Updated Android Gradle version and plugins to 8.9 - note that Gradle 9 will soon break deprecated methods being called somewhere... a problem for future me (or maybe you!)
• Completely overhauled the homepage to include a carousel of supported websites and allow the user to input queries (where supported) directly in the URL to avoid an extra page load
  • This relies on JS and CSS embedded in the source (alpine, tailwindcss), which hasn't been tested on WebView below Android 7... do let me know if something broke!
• Updated Twilio server User Agent
• Encoded the site title in the "Process starting" initializer message - this is not used by the client yet, but could allow for display on the top of the screen in the future.
• Fixed conditional handling of
  tags as block elements

Now that all that is out of the way, let's talk about what I see going forward for this app! For the immediate future, I still plan to occasionally fix bugs and add improvements to the communications protocol. But due to the reasons mentioned above, it is clear that it will take a significant amount of work to entirely redesign the UI given the minimum SDK constraints and my lack of UI expertise. I want to move forward with this concept as I still believe that an alternative to complex mobile data-network technology can still provide value to a lot of people for many different reasons. But, until I can network with people that find great benefit for adapting this concept in their community or find contributors who are willing to overhaul the foundational UI design of the app, continued development will likely be slow and infrequent.

Thank you all for your support. While I do get rid of logs with a script every couple weeks and don't share them with anybody, I have enjoyed seeing just how many people, from many unexpected countries, are testing out the app with the public server!

Luke