Hello, Zcash fans! The newest version of the zCat Android app, focused on Zcash, privacy & security - was released! Please, check if you run the newest version 0.1.1. What can you expect from the latest version? Let's have a deeper look.
Tor
You could redirect your traffic in previous version, too. But it was limited in some cases, such as fetching of the live price of Zcash directly from exchanges. This is now allowed, but unfortunatelly some exchanges are blocking Tor traffic via websockets. Thus, in some cases you can end up with data fetched through cached REST API (also redirected through Tor, if you enabled it). Data from the REST should not be older than 5 minutes.
News sources
There was extended list of the news portals focused on cyber security, privacy and hacking. You can add them to your feed to be up-to-date with the most current news. To already existing news sources:
in English:
in Spanish:
in Russian:
were added couple of new guys:
Unfortunatelly some of the news sources are also not accessible via Tor network. Furthermore, please, keep in mind that using Tor is slowing down the process fetching of the data from the news endpoints. You decide if you need to have Tor turned on.
If you are aware of any worthy news source which is missing and which offers accessible RSS feed, please, let me know.
Social networks
A bigger reconstruction was made in tracing of the latest posts form social networks. Originally, you were able to track the newest posts from pre-selected accounts on:
In the newest version you can track posts also from:
Please, keep in mind that the zCat is read only application. It does not use any profile access for any of these included social networks, and you are not able to make any post from it. Also, if there is any content restricted to subscribers, it might not be shown neither.
Additionally to this, you can newly maintain your track list for Free2Z, Nostr, and Reddit. There are still some preset accounts, but you can extend the track list as you wish (so, you are not senteced to see only post from sources cherry-picked by myself).
Note: Reddit can have issues if you are connected thorugh Tor, or even with some VPN services and block the requests to fetch data.
Smaller bug fixes
Here and there I caught some layout design issues, while using the app. One of the bigger changes was removing of the java-websocket library and using simply OkHttp also for the websocket communication (it influenced fetching of the live price data from exchanges and fetching the data from Nostr protocol). There was a smaller stability issue in v0.1.0 due to different handeling of exceptions in websocket communication, but it should be patched in v0.1.1.
I tried to use some libraries for communication with Nostr protocol, but at the end I decided to go with custom implementation, which took probably the biggest time (and you might find some unexpected bugs). The main reason was to have bigger control over the communication and simpler option to set a proxy for potential Tor connection (yes, you can redirect all traffic through Tor now).
If you are not able to find any profile on Nostr, you can try to change the set of Nostr relays, but the default configuration should work in most cases.
Disabling ads
You could notice ads to other apps made by myself. These are hardcoded ads without any monetization. There is no ad network tracking your activity in the app. Because of that, you have now option to turn them off. If you consider them noisy, just disable it (only place where it should stay is setting page in the section Try Our Apps).
tl;dr
- Tor traffic for websockets,
- new sources for news feed,
- new social network to track: Nostr, ZECPages
- customizable track list for selected social networks: Free2Z, Nostr, Reddit
- option to turn off ads
Summary
That's all folks. If you will find any bug, or if you will have any idea for improvements, please, let me know. Thanks and enjoy the app!