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Group Income 2.8

Group Income Team • April 16, 2026

You might be wondering, “2.8?! What happened to 2.6 and 2.7?”

We needed a bug fixed before making another release. A rather serious edge-case mystery bug related to key rotations that could happen in rare circumstances when members left the group.

Meanwhile, our frontend developer kept turning out feature after feature. So once the important low-level fixes were complete, the release had accumulated several versions worth of new features.

Welcome to Group Income 2.8. Greater stability and resilience, and several awesome new features!

Audio Player

2.5 introduced an end-to-end encrypted video player, so it’s only right that 2.8 introduces an end-to-end encrypted audio player! 🥳

As always, users can rest easy knowing their privacy is completely protected. All our features are end-to-end encrypted.

But sometimes data doesn’t need to be end-to-end encrypted because it never hits the server to begin with. That brings us to message drafts.

Draft messages

No more fear that your message drafts will be lost if you switch conversations:

New Table Rendering

Before:

After:

New Settings UI

Both the user and group settings UIs have received a major revamp. They are now no longer jumbled together on one page but neatly organized into sections:

Progress spinners

Little quality-of-life UI tweaks have been added, like progress spinners for both uploading and downloading file attachments:

Many other little UI/UX improvements have been made as well (e.g. support for foreign language chatroom names). See a complete list below.

Technical Plumbing

We spent a lot of time fixing some very complicated edge cases related to:

  • Recovery from unexpected key rotation failures
  • Key sharing
  • Memory leaks from service worker ↔︎ page message passing

This release includes updates to the underlying Chelonia framework as well.

Release Notes

New Features

  • Built-in audio player for chat attachments
  • Draft messages are now preserved when switching channels
  • New and improved table rendering for Markdown in chat messages
  • Spinner shown during file uploads and downloads
  • Ability to modify defaults for chatroom notification and sound settings

Improvements

  • Redesigned user settings menu with better structure and navigation
  • Improved default sounds for chat message notifications
  • Chatrooms now support non-English names
  • Better unread indicators and interaction patterns in chat
  • New chat menu icon and fixed unread count not resetting
  • Loaded media is now cached to avoid redundant downloads
  • Dashboard bar graphs now show current and empty periods
  • Currency formatting now respects browser locale and fixes BTC symbol
  • Clearer messaging in login error dialog
  • External chat links now open in a new tab
  • Added helper text to channel name field for validation
  • BrowserSync port is now configurable via --browsersync-port=<port>
  • More reliable key rotation on member changes
  • General API improvements including refactoring, bugfixes, and Chelonia API migration
  • Updated Russian translations
  • Bumped dependencies

Bugfixes

  • Fixed an issue where .gif files lost their animation
  • You can now attach the same file consecutively
  • You can now attach files from multiple folders at once
  • Mentions no longer match special characters in chatrooms
  • Exited or removed users are now hidden from the @-mention list
  • Badge count now respects all-messages setting, not just mentions
  • Fixed missing logic and UI issues in edit channel modal
  • Emojis after markdown now size correctly
  • Fixed layout for vertical videos in the video player
  • Chat loading indicators now clear on room switch
  • Revoke invite prompt no longer appears twice
  • Fixed text overflowing in polls and various UI areas
  • Checkboxes and radio buttons now scale correctly with text sizes
  • Fixed blob URL and cache memory leaks
  • Unused MessagePorts are now closed after use to stop memory leaks
  • Namespace lookup now fails silently for missing usernames
  • Fix ESC not dismissing emoticons popup
  • Two bugfixes related to rendering “replying to:” UI

See the complete list of changes.

We hope you enjoyed this release!

Try it out on our official server!

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