Short and to the point, the way a changelog should be: three things are new in 1.4, one is faster, one uses less battery. No marketing copy wrapped around it — anyone who wants to know why we built it this way finds the reasoning below.

Four feed lenses

Until now the feed had one single order: newest first, done. As of 1.4 there are four local filters you can switch between at the top of the feed — Newest, Nearby, Most discussed and From friends. The word "local" is meant literally: all four lenses compute exclusively on your device, using posts it has already loaded anyway. There's no server call that says "show me the most discussed" — your phone just re-sorts what's already there.

That's deliberately slower in result than a server that pre-computes and caches this for millions of people at once — but it also means we don't know which lens you're using, let alone what you're filtering by. That information never leaves your phone, because it's never sent to us.

Faster direct messages

Delivery of direct messages was, in rare cases, noticeably slow — especially when a conversation was resumed after a longer pause and the app first had to renegotiate the connection to the relay from scratch. We moved the negotiation step earlier: if the app is running in the background, it now keeps the relay connection warm in most cases, instead of building it from zero on the next message. Result in our measurements: noticeably shorter time between sending and arrival, especially after pauses of several hours.

A background service that sleeps

The biggest battery drain so far was our own background service, which regularly checked whether new messages had arrived — even after hours of nobody writing anything. As of 1.4 the service recognizes quiet periods and stretches the intervals between checks on its own, all the way to fully sleeping during several hours of inactivity. As soon as there's activity again — you open the app, or a push notification briefly wakes it — it's immediately back. In our internal tests on older Android devices, HIY's background battery usage dropped noticeably; how much it changes for you depends on your device and how you use it.

Smaller fixes

  • Group names now truncate correctly when very long (previously they could run off the edge of the screen).
  • A rare crash when quickly switching between chats right after app start is fixed.
  • The security number shown when pairing a new device for the first time now displays correctly in both color themes (light/dark) — previously too faint in light system theme.

What's not in here

No new feature designed to hold your attention longer, no badge counter that grows just to lure you back. The four lenses are a filter option, not a recommendation engine — they only re-sort what's already in your feed, they don't fetch anything new to keep you around longer. All computed purely locally, we still see none of it.