🤖 Haven 1.2.13 “Cylon”

Today is an exciting day for Haven. This release is particularly special. You’ve asked for it. We’ve heard you. The OP is delivering today!

We’re pleased to be releasing ‘backup and restore’ functionality in Haven.

The release is named after ‘Cylon’ resurrection technology, of course.

Resurrect your store on any device.

Overview

Backup/restore is the flagship feature of this release. Bug fixes that improve the shopping and listing creation experiences are also included.

We had hoped to include push notifications for orders in this release, but we elected to push it to the next release cycle, which will include other improvements to orders.

🏆 Major feature: Backup/restore

Until now, the most that you could do to backup your store was copy down your wallet ‘seed’. When added to a BIP39 compatible wallet, it would give you access to any funds controlled by your OpenBazaar wallet. While the funds in your wallet would be safe, it would not recover your store or any of the active orders in progress. What we needed was a complete solution that would not only recover your funds, but your profile/store data.

What we have developed for this release is a method that will backup the data directory of the OpenBazaar node running on your device. This means that all of your listings, orders, and critically the database (used to maintain your store) is preserved. The data directory is compressed into a password-protected encrypted zip file. From there, you can either save it to your device and/or upload it to a cloud service of your choice.

The encrypted backup can be saved anywhere on your device or uploaded to the cloud service of your choosing. The backup process may take a minute or more depending on the size of the data directory.

The backup file has a name like: havenBackup_QmP8tT_20191212030330.zip The middle part of the name is the first 6 characters of the node’s peerId. The last part of the name is the date, which means you can save multiple backups at different times without the fear of overwriting any of them.

You can restore your profile from a backup file either from Onboarding or the Settings.

Is the backup process automatic or manual?

The backup process is manual, and we highly encourage you to regularly backup your profile using a strong password. There is a long and complicated reason why it isn’t automatic, and it’s something we hope to support in the future. For now, all backups must be initiated by you the user.

Can I import my desktop store into Haven (or visa versa)?

Theoretically yes, but we haven’t tried this in our testing. We don’t see any reason there would be a problem though since Haven runs a full OpenBazaar node like the desktop application. If you try this, please backup your Haven store first and do not run the same node from your mobile device and desktop at the same time, as we haven’t configured OpenBazaar to support multi-device syncing.

Will restoring my backup restore the funds in my wallet?

Yes! Not only will it restore the funds in your wallet, it will restore any orders you have open with funds locked in escrow, so that you can proceed with completing the order.

Do I still need to backup my seed?

Backing up your profile is a much more comprehensive safety feature than just copying your seed somewhere. That said, you should probably do both just in case.

Will I lose my chat messages or social posts if I backup/restore my profile?

No. All your data, including chat messages and social posts, are saved when you backup your store!

🐞 Bugfix: Camera and QR scanner failing in some Android devices

We discovered some of our users were seeing a black screen when they tried to take a photo with their Android device in the app (for a listing or post), or when they tried to scan a QR code. The bug has been fixed and included in this release.

🍺 Feature: Tapping the social feed icon in the footer tab will scroll you to the top

Tapping the social feed icon in the footer will scroll you back to the top of the feed. Bonus: during this process we also cleaned up some other code that improved the overall responsiveness of the app in Android.

🍺 Feature: Refreshed the notifications view

We have refreshed the notifications view to only have two instead of three tabs for notifications: social and orders. This improves performance while making things simpler and easier to manage.

Switch between your social and order notifications

🐞 Minor bugfixes

Three minor bug fixes were made to the following:

1. When creating a listing and adding a shipping option, the keyboard would obscure the addition item price field.
2. In checkout, when selecting a different currency or transaction priority, sometimes you would be nagged with ‘please select fee level’ even though you had.
3. In the social feeds, when viewing a post’s comments/reposts/likes, another user’s avatar and name weren’t displaying properly.

What’s next

1. Important improvements to orders are scheduled, which will include push notifications
2. There are some cool design changes in store for the front page of the app!
3. Listing links posted in the social feed will come with a cool preview that you can tap and navigate to

Until next time… stay free, trade free 🙏

Download Haven now from the Apple App Store or Google Play and get your favorite cryptocurrencies ready to shop!

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