wire-android_legacy

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I understand that there should be a balance between high security and convenience. I got several feedbacks that Wire is rather annoying that it "loses" history, or "doesn't even have one". This seems to be rooting in two "features":

1. Wire doesn't retry sending automagically and for extended periods of time. I noticed that on a bad connection almost impossible to keep a conversation since messages do not get sent, and they are correctly shown as unsent; however they don't get retried but require me to keep tapping on resend, a few dozen times, until it sends successfully. Obviously not sent messages will never be in the other end's history. Since people cannot usually be expected to act as resending robots messages get lost, really easily. (Especially larger ones like imagery.)

2. Wire seem to lose history on purpose for older conversations. I haven't checked whether it's due to willful removal because of old/expired keys or it's just that wire have lost or never acquired the data or the required crypto material, but it's extremely unpleasant for everyday use.

The problem is that people rather move over to vastly insecure programs to have their convenient and up to date conversations available, so if it's a decision then these users absolutely would select the option to "keep history" instead of "being super secure and remove entries with old keys", even if it'd mean to keep the old keys.

Anything on this? Especially the first point I have experienced myself a few times. Also, I think the automatic retry should even go as far as to retry when the app is closed, so users don't have to care whether their messages get delivered, as the eventually "automagically" will

Hi. I'm going through old issues in order to close some of them. But in this case I think it'll be better if I first answer :) Ad 1: We try resending messages when we detect a network change (e.g. 3G -> WiFi). If the network stays the same, we use exponential backoff. It means that after first few tries, the interval between the consequent ones are getting longer. The functionality was changed and tinkered with during the last two years, so... Can you comment how does it work for you now?
Ad 2: This is true. Under certain conditions old assets are being deleted.

The resend problem still remains annoying as described above, maybe the base for exponential back-off is too large (if you double the retry time, after 10 retries it is 1000 times longer, most likely too long - I would maximise the retry timer not to go over a minute or so).

The lost key problem happens way too frequently. I use wire on android and on windows, but have a browser based wire on another PC; if I don't start wire for (I guess a week or maybe a month) the messages seem to be downloaded, but cannot be decrypted for some reason. The correspondent messages are not decoded, mine (from the other device) are. The suggested reset does not help. Sorry for vague description, but I just uninstalled wire from one such device and do not have exact messages.

See also https://github.com/wireapp/wire-android/issues/1517