We’re releasing the Signal 4.45 beta soon. If you’re interested in participating, join the beta group here .

Share your feedback on the latest changes:

★ Signal now supports video compression on Android 8+ devices so you can send smaller files while sharing bigger moments.

★ Android TalkBack accessibility improvements.

Complete list of new commits since 4.44.7

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/compare/453f93a84fd7f1e7ce2a3a45809215c3321524ee...master

The big feature that we’re looking to test here is video compression. It’s been a long time coming! (See Option to compress video)

As mentioned in that post, the big thing holding us back was the ability to encrypt the video output stream before it hit disk. In this initial release, we’ve gotten around it by writing the output of the operation to a native in-memory file descriptor. That means the output size of files are a bit limited, and as a result we still have an upper limit on the sizes of videos that can be compressed, but we believe that this current iteration should cover many of the use cases where users are sending video.

Of course video compression can get dicey with device-specific and video-specific problems, so that’s where you folks come in

Please test sending videos in Signal, and if you encounter any problems, please post a debug log here. In addition, if you’re ever able to post the source video as well, that’d also be much-appreciated (just make sure whatever you use to share it doesn’t also compress it!)

Thank you for being a beta tester!