Whisperfish is a native Signal client for Sailfish OS. The user interface is heavily based on the jolla-messages application written by Jolla Ltd.

Whisperfish has plenty of features these days and is in a mostly usable state. Join our development channel on Matrix (#whisperfish:rubdos.be) or Libera.Chat (#whisperfish) to get in touch, and check our wiki to see whether Whisperfish would work for you.

To install, you have two options:

• Releases from OpenRepos
• "Nightly" builds from the Gitlab Package Registry.

In most cases, there should be no need to install from Git directly. We push regular updates to OpenRepos, when they make sense.

Please mind that Whisperfish in still in beta condition, which means that certain things do not work, other things make the application crash, and I've heard reports that beta software can be a cause for dogs eating homework. You've been warned. On the other hand, we have many people happily using Whisperfish as daily driver, and we make up for lacking features in our community support in the aforementioned Matrix and IRC room. Please come say hello! We don't bite (we may byte), and we don't eat homework.

This project started from a now outdated Go-based SailfishOS client for Signal. This version, 0.6 and onwards, is a complete rewrite, and uses libsignal-client instead. This means we aim for better maintainability. It also means the whole SailfishOS app had to be rewritten, and you may want to make a back-up of your current files if you still come from 0.5. Specifically:

• .local/share/harbour-whisperfish contains all your data.
• .config/harbour-whisperfish contains the apps configuration.

In current releases the paths have changed:

• .local/share/be.rubdos/harbour-whisperfish
• .config/be.rubdos/harbour-whisperfish

• Registration
• Contact Discovery
• Direct messages
• Group messages
• Sealed sending
• Storing conversations
• Sending attachments
• Taking a photo as an attachment
• Taking a video as an attachment
• Encrypted identity and session store
• Encrypted message store
• Advanced user settings
• Multi-Device support (links with Signal Desktop)
• Encrypted local attachment store
• Archiving conversations
• Muting conversations

Please search the issue tracker before filing any bug report or feature request. Please upvote issues that are important to you. We use the vote counter for determining a feature's priority.

Whisperfish connects to Signal using Websockets. For a better user experience try adjusting the power settings on your Jolla to disable late suspend. This should keep the network interfaces up and allow Whisperfish to maintain websocket connections even when the device is in "sleep". This could potentially impact your battery life depending on your usage. Otherwise every time your device goes into deep sleep, the Websocket connection is broken and you may not receive messages until the next time the OS wakes up and Whisperfish reconnects.

To disable late suspend and enable "early suspend" run:

mcetool --set-suspend-policy=early

See here for more information.

1. https://together.jolla.com/question/55056/dynamic-pm-in-jolla/
2. http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=1401956&postcount=29
3. https://sailfishos.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS_Cheat_Sheet#Blocking_Device_Suspend

Whisperfish is written in Rust (and QML), and Rust is a bit of a special entity in Sailfish OS. Luckily, Jolla has provided a more or less decent Rust compiler since Sailfish OS 3.4, but it had some issues, which were https://github.com/sailfishos/rust/pull/14 only in Sailfish OS 4.5. Using the corresponding Sailfish SDK 3.10.4 is practically a requirement. Older versions may still work, but are not supported. Using an older version should not be needed, since the binary works all the way down to Sailfish OS 3.4 (at least).

Note: Only the Docker build engine supports Rust compiling. VirtualBox build engine will not work.

Since early January 2024, building Whisperfish (again) requires installing Rust (and its dependencies) from Ruben's repository. This is needed until the Sailfish SDK Jolla releases provides Rust 1.75.0 - at the time of writing the version is 1.52 (with 1.61 upstreamed).

Please see Rust 1.75 build instructions for details.

Once you have the SDK up and running and the Whisperfish sources fetched, it compiles just like any other native Sailfish OS application.

Set the build target 4.5.0.18 and architecture of your choice (builds for target 4.5.0.18 should also work for a few Sailfish OS versions back, too):

sfdk config target=SailfishOS-4.5.0.18-aarch64 build

Then just build it:

sfdk build

If you want to also build the sharing plugin for SFOS 4.3 , use this command (note the double double dashes):

sfdk build -- --with shareplugin_v2

For Sailfish 4.2 and older, use --with shareplugin_v1 instead.

Because of a bug in sb2, it is currently not possible to (reliably) build Whisperfish (or any other Rust project) using more than a single thread. This means your compilation is going to take a while, especially the first time. Get yourself some coffee!

If you get errors (command not found or status 126) at linking stage, make sure that you are not using ~/.cargo/config to override linkers or compilers.

For voice and video calling, Whisperfish requires the RingRTC library, including Signal's custom WebRTC implementation. You can download pre-built artifacts with the following command:

bash fetch-webrtc.sh

See https://www.rubdos.be/2024/09/08/building-ringrtc-for-whisperfish.html for how to build these artifacts.

To build Whisperfish with support for voice and video calls included, use

sfdk build -- --with calling

This triggers the cargo build --feature calling feature flag, which adds voice and video support.

Building Whisperfish on your host machine is also possible. This is useful for development and debugging purposes. There are some differences to be aware of.

The RPM automatically selects the sailfish feature flag, which will not compile outside of SailfishOS. This feature flag is not enabled by default, so it doesn't sit in the way.

You'll have to manually set the OUTPUT_DIR variable, which contains the output of the webrtc build. The fetch-webrtc.sh script fetches libwebrtc.a pre-built for all four architectures, and for the two major versions of OpenSSL (3.x, and 1.1.1).

bash fetch-webrtc.sh
OUTPUT_DIR=$PWD/ringrtc/322/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/ cargo build --features bundled-sqlcipher

You can swap out 322 for 111 if your system uses OpenSSL 1.1.1.

Whisperfish uses SQLCipher to store its data. SQLCipher is essentially SQLite with encryption features. Entering a password when registering Whisperfish makes the database encrypted, without password it's just a plain SQLite database.

During development it's often handy to have a database or schema at hand. If you don't want to mess with your Whisperfish database, or even a copy of it, you can create a plain SQLite database with create-database.sh.

See doc: Cool hacks for development

Whisperfish supports i18n translations and uses Text ID Based Translations. For an easy way to help translating, you can join on Weblate.

Before Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.1, "the Rust port", Whisperfish was licensed under the GNU General Public License. Since Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.1, Whisperfish links to AGPLv3 code, and as such is a combined work as meant under clause 13 of the GPLv3.

The original GPLv3 licensed code that is still contained in this repository, still falls under GPLv3, as per the copyright of Andrew E. Bruno. This is the original license statement:

Copyright (C) 2016-2018 Andrew E. Bruno

Whisperfish is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

This is the license statement since 2019, since Whisperfish 0.6.0-alpha.1.

Copyright (C) 2019-2020 Ruben De Smet, Markus Törnqvist

Whisperfish is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Whisperfish is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.