Tact 1.7 is now available in App Store for both iOS and macOS. Here’s what’s new.

⚠️ Broken version warning

Before we get to the new features, we inform you of a bug that briefly existed in Tact 1.7.0 on iOS. Upgrading from earlier versions to 1.7.0 may have broken Tact on your iOS device and not show you the correct content. We regret this bug and are sorry about it. You can fix this by deleting Tact completely from this device and then reinstall it from App Store. This does not affect or delete your chats and messages.

We published Tact 1.7.1 to the App Store which does not have this bug. It is safe to upgrade from earlier versions to 1.7.1.

With this warning out of the way, let’s look at what’s new in this version.

Better “Load more”

When you open a chat in Tact, you see recent messages and reactions, and can load more earlier content with a button. When that content is already available on your device, Tact shows it instantly. When that content is in iCloud but not yet in your device, Tact fetches it from iCloud and then displays it to you.

This “fetching from iCloud” part got a lot better in Tact 1.7, especially if you have lots of history in your chats. This was quite early and old code in Tact, not updated for our later iCloud schema improvements. Since we first published Tact, we have made improvements to how we store and index your data in iCloud, but “Load more” was not yet taking full advantage of that. It would first have to retrieve lots of irrelevant content, possibly from several of your chats, and only then filter out what is needed for the current chat. Also, it would not fetch old reactions.

Both of these problems are now fixed in Tact 1.7. “Load more” loads much faster from iCloud, and also shows you old reactions.

Removed entering emotes

Emote messages in the form of “Emily goes to the beach” were an interesting idea, but they don’t vibe with us as well as the other features. We decided to remove entering this type of messages from this version. Tact will still show you any previously entered emote messages, but you can’t send new ones any more.

Request notification improvements

We keep working on how Tact delivers and shows you notifications. In this version, there were many under-the-hood improvements, and there will be more in the future versions. We possibly eliminated some crashes at app startup related to this.

As one visible change, the notifications you receive when someone requests to chat with you or adds you to a group got clearer text, and also now show you the inviter’s custom message directly in the notification.

Preparation for end-to-end encrypted messages

A while ago, Apple started offering Advanced Data Protection for iCloud for users that wish to have the highest levels of security assurance for their data on iCloud, including data from apps like Tact. It is an optional setting that each user can turn on for their Apple Account, considering both the benefits and limitations that this will bring.

In this version, Tact is starting to move towards storing all your messages as encrypted on iCloud. We enabled support for reading such messages in this version, but didn’t enable sending them yet, to ensure a seamless transition. The next Tact version will turn on sending encrypted messages, and this version can read them, so that there wouldn’t be any service interruptions.

There is a difference between encrypted, and end-to-end encrypted. From next version onwards, your Tact messages on iCloud will be encrypted, but not necessarily end-to-end encrypted. We have previously published a technical blog post about this. Read it if you are interested in how Advanced Data Protection and iCloud end-to-end-encryption will work in apps like Tact.

Changed list filter icons in iOS

We updated the icons in iOS list filter menu for more clarity and fun.