A status report from the bench. Current builds as of today: PresenceOS Beta 7 v1.5.30 and Guardian Companion v1.3.50, both running on the moto g56 5G that every screenshot on this site comes from.
Pairing is now one button, then a tap
Adding a contact on PresenceOS was always NFC-only and face-to-face. What shipped recently is how little ceremony it needs. From the live app, verbatim:
Only one of you presses Start Pairing. The other phone just needs Presence installed and its screen on — then tap the phones together and agree how long the connection lasts.
One person presses one button. Phones touch. Both of you agree on the connection and its time limit. That’s the entire flow — no codes read out loud, no usernames, no “add me on this platform.” And when either of you deletes the connection later, it’s deleted on both phones. Deleting a contact also deletes you from their device. I remain convinced this is how it always should have worked.
Backups: fixing the worst kind of bug
I found a genuinely nasty one in the backup system: under specific conditions a device holding someone’s encrypted backup shard could drop a write and still acknowledge it as stored. The backup looked green; a slice of it wasn’t there. A backup system that can lie about success is worse than no backup system, because it cancels the paranoia that would otherwise save you.
So the transfer protocol got rebuilt: data now moves in chunks, every chunk is acknowledged individually, and “success” is only reported when the holder has verifiably written what it received — in both directions, restore included. It shipped in early July, and it’s the change I’m most relieved about this month. If you made backups on much older builds, make a fresh one — the current protocol won’t trust what the old one claimed.
Push notifications without Google, actually
The “0 Google services” line on the front page has a hard engineering consequence: no Firebase Cloud Messaging, which is the mechanism nearly every Android app uses to wake a sleeping phone. Rather than quietly keeping that one Google dependency like most de-Googled projects do, the apps now wake through a long-poll channel to my own server. Your phone rings for a call and chimes for a message with zero Google in the delivery path. This was genuinely hard to get right — sleeping radios and OS-level app freezing fight you the whole way — and watching a locked phone ring through it never gets old.
Alongside it, the update system now enforces a minimum version: when I raise the floor, outdated builds must update before they reconnect. That’s what keeps end-to-end encryption locked in as the only way to chat on PresenceOS — there’s never an old, weaker build left limping along on the network.
The iOS Companion, honestly
Where it genuinely stands: the port of Guardian Companion to iOS is planned in detail — the porting document covers entry flow, location and recording behaviour differences on Apple’s side, and store compliance — but there are real decisions still open, the biggest being how push notifications should travel on iOS without betraying the no-third-party principle more than Apple’s platform forces you to. It will be sold through the App Store, following Apple’s guidelines, like the Android version will be through Google’s.
No ship date from me until it’s real. When you see it here, it exists; that’s the standing rule on this site.
Small things that also shipped
- Navigation is now pure swipe — back and forward are edge swipes everywhere, and the tap-back buttons are gone. Screens had to earn the removal one by one so nobody gets stranded.
- App permissions housekeeping on the device builds — the sort of invisible work where the changelog entry is “Files access now works” and the week behind it was not.
- Theme picker polish — four built-in themes, custom accent colours; sharing is still honestly labelled SOON on the home screen shortcut.
Every bug behind these fixes was found either on my bench or by beta testers whose reports land straight in my inbox. If you want to be one of them, the beta APK is on the download page — and if you want the whole story in one document, the whitepaper is a free download.
