Release notes, restated
bitchat Android 2.0.1
Published 11 August 2026 as GitHub tag v2.0.1. This page is our summary of the public notes, written so you can decide whether to update. The wording on the release itself is the source if a detail here feels compressed.
Highlights
- Wear OS. The watch can join the nearby mesh, use public chat and encrypted direct messages, browse people, manage favorites and verification, receive notifications, record voice notes, and receive images and files.
- Two chat styles. A classic layout, or bubbles colored by peer, including media, timestamps, and delivery marks that follow the bubble.
- Live push-to-talk. Voice in public channels and in encrypted direct messages, on the phone and on the watch, with recording feedback and slide-to-cancel.
- Cashu. The app recognizes and previews Cashu eCash tokens, offers a
/paycommand, and can hand redemption to an external wallet or a web flow. Anyone who obtains a token may be able to redeem it. - Private threads stick around. History, unread state, aliases, favorites, and previews survive a restart. Deleting a conversation has a clearer control.
- Geohash globe. Browse location channels on a native animated globe, with borders, cities, polar coverage, and a quality setting. The globe can be explored offline. Live rooms still need a connection.
- Languages. Change language inside the app.
- Sharing the APK. Pass an installed APK to a nearby phone, and resume update downloads that are checked against a signature.
- Reliability. The notes call out queued delivery and ordering, Noise session recovery, receipts, peer lifecycle, safer Wi-Fi Direct cleanup, bounded payload processing, quieter logs, and a more complete panic wipe of in-memory network state.
Build trust
The maintainers describe 2.0.1 as the first reproducible full-app release. Unsigned phone and watch binaries were built twice in separate GitHub Actions jobs. The bytes matched before the artifacts were signed. The signed APKs and the Play bundles shipped with a build-info file and SHA-256 manifests. The unsigned binaries themselves are not attached. Their hashes live in the attested manifest so someone with Docker can rebuild and compare.
This website does not repeat that rebuild. We mirror the signed APKs and publish the same SHA-256 values. Play upload bundles are left on GitHub because they are not sideload files.
Compared with 1.7.4
The GitHub compare view from 1.7.4 to v2.0.1 is the full code diff. The jump is large enough that reading only an older APKMirror blurb will miss the watch app, the globe, and the reproducible-build work.