Downloading and installing Status Desktop

📥 Downloading Status

First you will need to download the latest release of Status Desktop from here.

On Windows:

• Locate and double-click the .exe file. (It will usually be in your Downloads folder.)
• Follow the instructions to install the software.

On Linux

• Extract the contents of the tarball with tar –xvzf StatusIm-Desktop-<version>.tar.gz
• Run the extracted StatusIm-Desktop-<version>.AppImage

On Mac:

• Open Status.dmg
• Copy Status.app to the Applications folder
• You will need to "right click -> open" when running it for the first time (due to new Apple requirements for notarization). You may need to "right click -> open" twice.

It is strongly recommended that you follow the “I’m new to Status” path in the onboarding screens to generate a new seed phrase. After you have signed in for the first time, make sure you back up your seed phase securely. You can do this by clicking on the red 'back up seed phrase' banner that will appear at the top of the window.

If you use a seed phrase that you have previously used with Status, you are guaranteed to run into some known issues. It is recommend that you don't do this.

Note: Status Desktop is currently in beta and meant for testing by core contributors only. It's not yet ready for real use and makes no claims of security or integrity of funds or data in these builds. DO NOT USE IT TO STORE ANY ASSETS OF VALUE.

When choosing a username, it is recommended that you use the same username you are using in Discord / Github (this will make it easier for other CC’s to recognise you).

🤝 How to join the Status Internal community

1. Click the “Start chat” button

2. This will open a view to start a new chat. Enter Iuri’s chat key into the “To:” field:

Iuri’s chat key - zQ3shdkzLTUx5s98XRXenEwPX56RhxGWjLnihcx79dhNai4wW

3. Status should recognize this key is Iuri’s and immediately open the "send contact request" dialog so you can send a contact request to him:

4. Send Iuri a nice message while you’re at it, something that will make him smile. Also let Iuri know you’re a new IFT core contributor and mention your full name and the name of the team you have just joined. Click the “Send Contact Request” button to send the contact request.

5. Iuri should have a pending contact request from yourself. You need to wait for Iuri to accept your request.

6. Once Iuri has accepted your request (congrats, you’re now friends with Iuri), he will send you a link to Status Internal community (if you don’t receive this link, ping @helium__ on Discord).

7. Click the “Go to Community” button:

8. This will take you to the Status Internal community. Click the “Request to join” button:

9. This will open a dialog that shows you a welcome message + some rules you might need to follow within this community. Check the “I agree with the above” box and click the “Request to join” button:

10. You’ve just sent a request to join the community! Iuri has to manually approve your request, so depending on your waking hours and time zone, this request might be pending for a bit. (if your request to join is not accepted within 48hrs ping @helium on Discord).

11. Once Iuri has accepted your request, the Status Internal community will automatically unlock and you’ll be able to chat with your dearest friends and colleagues using Status 🙂 But you are not done yet, there is one more thing we need to ask you to do.

12. Go to the “Settings” section in Status Desktop by clicking on the cog wheel in the left hand navigation bar:

13. Select “Advanced” in the settings menu:

14. Scroll down until you see the “Telemetry” setting. Turn it on by clicking the toggle switch. This will open a dialog that asks you to confirm this action. Confirm this action. It’s really important that all CCs do this so that we can monitor Waku v2’s reliability as part of this dogfooding effort.

15. Congrats, you are now a Status user, as well as a IFT core contributor 🎉

Now let’s get this product polished to the point where we all enjoy using it - please report any bugs you encounter and suggest improvements or new features that you personally need. Instructions for this are below.

Also, don’t forget to read the list of “Known bugs” below, otherwise you won’t know about some important things you should or should not do with this release of Status Desktop, like not suspending your computer (because suspending your computer with Status running will result in missing messages).

👋 Contact requests and ad-hoc group chat

Because Status is a fully p2p network that is not under the control of any authority (including ourselves! 🙂), there are a number of mechanisms we have introduced to mitigate spam.

One of these mechanisms is ‘mutual contacts’. What this means is that in order to start a 1on1 conversation with another person, or to add somebody to an ad-hoc group chat, you first need to be a mutual contact with that person. So it is recommended that you send ‘Contact requests’ in Status to all the other core contributors that you may need to chat with outside of the Status Internal community space.

Here is a useful link to the IFT core contributors' contact list, which contains everyone's chat keys (and names/emails etc).

Like Discord, Status also supports small ad-hoc group chats. Unlike Discord, which only supports 10 participants in each ad-hoc group chat, Status currently supports 20 participants and hopefully, we can further increase this number in the future. So if you need to have a small private group chat about something, give this functionality a try!

🐞 How to report bugs

(If you are already experienced with reporting bugs you can skip this section)

One of the reasons we dogfood is to identify bugs! So if you think you have run into a bug, it would be much appreciated if you follow these instructions to report the issue:

1. Go to the Status Desktop repo on GitHub and have a quick look to see if the issue has already been reported. If you see that the issue has already been reported, you can leave a comment on the issue saying “I’ve experienced this bug” and add any additional information (if any) from your experience that’s not already in the bug report.

Don’t worry about accidentally creating a duplicate bug, this happens all the time and the Desktop team will deduplicate any duplicate bugs reported.

2. If after a quick skim you can’t see a bug report that matches the issue you’ve encountered, click the green ‘New issue’ button to create a bug report. In the bug report, try to include the following:

• the version of Status Desktop you are using (you can see this by going to Settings / About in the app).
• the OS version you are using e.g. Windows 10, Ubuntu 20.04, etc…
• If possible, numbered steps of what to do to reproduce the bug.
• What is currently incorrectly happening, and what you think is supposed to happen.
• Screenshots are always useful. If you are set up to make screencasts, a screencast of you reproducing the bug is always appreciated.

And that’s it, if you follow these steps you’ve written a highly descriptive and informative bug report that’s better than 95% of bug reports 🙂

⬆️ How to request a new feature or an improvement to an existing feature

Many of us use group chats on various platforms (Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp etc.) for work or as part of our hobbies and personal lives. This means that everybody who works at IFT is an expert group chat user, and as such your input on what improvements and new features we need to build is extremely valuable.

To gather and prioritise this feedback, we have set up a ‘User Voice board’ for Status Desktop on Feature UpVote. We plan to use a user voice board like this (but obvs. styled nicer to be on-brand 😉 ) with external users to capture their feedback after we launch our MVP, so now is a great opportunity to give this method of collecting user feedback a trial run on ourselves.

The idea behind a user voice board is simple - anybody can post an improvement idea or feature request, everybody can upvote requests that are important to them, and designers and developers working on the desktop product can respond to these suggestions.

Give Feature UpVote a go 🙂 Just upvoting (or not upvoting) requests helps build a prioritised backlog to feed into the product development roadmap.