We’re excited to roll-out what we’ve been hard at work over the last few weeks!

🌟 New Features

Categories and Subcategories

The category section of Haven has been completely rebuilt in the following ways.

Category selection. The category selection component was moved to underneath the banner images. Instead of a horizontally scrollable component, there are now to 5 buttons for the top categories and an option to view all the categories in ‘More’.

Tapping ‘More’ will give you the full range of categories of products for sale on the marketplace.

Subcategories. Listings can now be subcategorised within their parent category!

Every category comes with a subcategory list

Category schema. The old category schema has been abandoned in favour of something more comprehensive. We elected to use AliExpress’ category schema for several reasons, one of the most important being that there are several stores drop-shipping thousands of products that adhere to it already.

Three categories were also added to the schema:

Books (we shamelessly used Amazon’s subcategory schema) Gift cards Other (for things that just don’t fit anywhere)

A full outline of the schema and corresponding search queries to retrieve listings for those categories and subcategories can be found below.

Create/edit listings. You can now assign a new or existing listing a category and subcategory.

Adding a category/subcategory isn’t mandatory, but it will help your products be discovered.

Push notifications

This update introduces push notification support for iOS and Android. Updated users who enable push notifications can receive announcements, giveaways, and promotions messages from us (OB1). We promise not to spam you, but rather let you know of exciting news and events happening in Haven.

At any time you can enter the settings and disable push notifications altogether, or specific message types.

You have full control of what notifications you receive from us.

Haven uses Firebase Cloud Messaging to delivery push notifications to devices. With regard to your privacy, we have disabled all analytic tools that are bundled with Firebase and we have not added any Google analytics.

Critically, this work lays the foundation for app-to-app push notifications for things like chat messages, social activity, and order messages… all of which we plan to roll-out soon in future updates.

🐛 Bug fixes

1. Fixed in-app link sharing

In our last update, we completely changed how link-sharing worked so that content would be universally be accessible via https://openbazaar.com.

One drawback was that links shared in the app would take you outside the app to the .com, and you’d have to tap a link to view the content in the app. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and we’ve fixed this so that links tapped within Haven will open that content inside of Haven.

2. Accepted coin preferences

We received reports that coin preferences in Settings weren’t being saved. There was definitely a bug there and we have patched the issue in this update.

3. iOS CPU performance

We’ve made some under-the-hood changes that should improve the performance and battery life for iOS users. Please let us know in our Telegram group if you’ve noticed a difference, better or worse:

4. Networking

Another under-the-hood change we’ve made will speed up the sending and receiving chat and order messages to other peers on the network.

🚧 What’s Next

The next update should also be another big one, and should include:

Haven app-to-app push notifications for chat, social, and order activities Massive social update that will introduce a personalised feed, instant updates, social notifications, and lay the groundwork for topic channels More under-the-hood work to get ready for Ethereum (and ERC-20 token) payment support

Until next time… stay free, trade free 🙏