Snowball — Release Notes (5 July 2026)

A cumulative summary of what's changed since the beta launched.

Based on Your Feedback

Update your email or phone number — Suggested by Ning! You can now change either on your profile. A new email is committed only after you verify it and the old address is notified. Changing your number now migrates your existing profile onto the new SIM — same account and history, with the old number kept until the new one is verified.
iOS contact search results finally useable — Suggested by Amelia!. Resolved iOS contact search issues where results could disappear under the header or soft keyboard. Also fixed the iOS field editor getting hidden while composing your message.
Better message composer — Suggested by Linda! The "Other…" custom-text field gained explicit confirm/cancel buttons and a placeholder, and the Share templates now offer the words they teased as placeholders (e.g. "Participate," "your help").
Clearer settings — Suggested by Linda! Settings pages are titled and their empty-state links point straight to importing entries.
Clearer verifications — Suggested by Bob! Verification-expiry times read in sensible units (e.g. "30 days," not "719 hours") and SMS/email verification message now remind not to share the code.
Clearer unlock for Sharing — Suggested by Bob! It's now a little more obvious why you need to "Swear I'll come right back to confirm" before the Share in Messaging App button is enabled.

Listing managers contact card. Topics show their managers' email addresses so viewers can reach out — rendered with anti-scraping defenses and a deliberate Copy step, and hidden on by-invitation-only topics.
Device Picker in Address Book. A device contact picker is available directly in the Address Book (previously only in the share flow), built on a shared, reusable component, with a short platform-specific how-to explainer.
Share Updates. Change a topic you've already shared and notify just the people you previously messaged: a new flow shows what's changed, collects a short summary, and pre-fills recipients by privately matching your address book against your past recipients on your device. Recipients can reshare it onward.
Topic change history. Each topic has a "Recent changes" subpage listing what you edited this session — name, type, date/time, description, and image swaps — as a chronological before/after diff.
Consistent action bars. The Address Book Export/Import bar and every share wizard step now share one fixed footer dock with even spacing across devices, a keyboard-aware field editor, and clearer batch-share reminders.

Blank wizard after reload. Reloading mid-wizard no longer leaves steps blank, and an abandoned, unverified phone/email edit no longer lingers on the summary.
Private topics stay private. A guest hitting a by-invitation-only topic gets a proper "not found" instead of leaking its existence; a related crash was fixed. Reusing an email already on another profile now returns a clear message instead of a raw database error.

Declarative authorization model. Replaced bespoke permission checks with a single declarative Casbin priority/deny model (by-invitation access, manager-only sharing, beta-only topic creation), with a reversible migration.
Batch recipient resolution. Collapsed per-contact hash lookups and the split "match then create" dance into batched get-or-create and hash-lookup endpoints, shared by the share wizard, send-time resync, and background sync.
Frontend plumbing. Simplified UserContext to write-through persistence, gave the IDV confirm endpoint a typed response, and standardized naming ("ensure," "pending") across the profile/IDV flow.
Dev & test tooling. Centralized per-environment tooling config in one package, added a pr-e2e-test skill and one-command PR status reporting, expanded E2E coverage (topic changes, Share Updates) with automatic test-user cleanup, and improved dev tunnels. Ongoing module refactors and a shared ASCII logo constant.