Yo, sup gang. I’ve got another release for you. All Zap contributors are now healthy and catching a rhythm, expect to hear from us often. Today I have the new Zap Desktop 0.2.1 which may be the last release you ever manually download.

Why? This release comes with automated builds and automatic updates going forward. Zap will check every hour on the hour for any new released changes and download them for you (if you confirm) so you don’t have to self manage all of our future updates + releases.

I’ll get into some of the fun details below, but if you’d like to skip the noise and get dat new new you can find it here.

Automatic Updates

Starting with 0.2.1, Zap Desktop will now check for new released changes every hour on the hour, prompting you with an option to auto download the latest changes you don’t have and restart the application 🎊

We also have configured our deployment to create a draft release every time a commit is merged into our repository. With this new deployment system we can push out fixes, features and new designs very frequently, having everything auto-download and automated for you all.

New Wallet Architecture

We have implemented new wallet architecture to support multiple types of connections and multiple wallets. We previously leveraged LND’s default wallet directory which caused lots of confusion and didn’t allow for multiple different wallets within’ your Zap app. This architecture update improves on that and will support many big ambitious features going forward such as switching between multiple chains, multiple wallets, multiple configurations, etc.

Updated Backend Infrastructure

As Lightning Network implementations mature and technology like neutrino moves closer towards mainnet, we needed to update our backend infrastructure to something that is more reliable, robust, scalable, and easier to maintain.

Without going too deep into the weeds we’re leveraging Docker, Helm, Kubernetes clusters and Rancher. Our hope is this will act as a big step towards reliable Zap wallets going forward.

Updated LND and BTCD

Zap 0.2.1 is packaged with an updated version of LND and we are using updated versions of BTCD on the backend (will add Bitcoin Core when BIP 158 support is merged). We think this is a great opportunity for the community to help test some of the new fixes and features developed by Lightning Labs before we start seeing consumer facing mainnet Lightning Network wallets.

Looking forward

We have so much in store you won’t believe it. For the desktop app you can expect things like multi-currency support, multi-language support, all new onboarding, and much more right around the corner.

We’re also re-designing our iOS app. You can expect that to land on Testflight sooner than later.

Thanks

Appreciate the support y‘all. Make sure you download our Zap 0.2.1 release so you can get the option to auto-update to our frequent updates going forward.

You can contact me @JackMallers on twitter or zap@jackmallers.com via email.

Till next time friends. Enjoy 🍻