Zippie Alpha 4 release is out!

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve reached our next milestone. Yes, today, we released Zippie Alpha 4. Hurrah! The Zippie team has worked insanely long and hard to get this out into the world. It’s been a challenging process, mostly because the Zippie vault has been rewritten and a lot of optimisation has been done. What’s more, the Zippie card generated new UI flows such as recovery PIN code. Additionally, many parts of the UI have been improved and the team has fixed an incredible 38 bugs in a single month.

We’ve managed to shorten the Zippie signup time to just 12 seconds, which is probably the fastest onboarding in the blockchain world.

The main feature of the Alpha 4 release is Zippie card functionality. In this release, Zippie supports adding a card with a recovery PIN code and confirming the payment with a card. Recovery with the card and revoking a card will be supported in the next releases.

Zippie dapp API

There are also many under-the-hood improvements. For a start, we’ve now created documentation on how to get going with dapp development using the Zippie vault API. If you’re into dapp development, please take a look at this doc and give us feedback. Please note that the Wallet API is still a work in progress. Even with the current codebase, though, you can get the 12 second onboarding without any browser extensions or saving recovery phrases.

Testing Zippie releases

On top of all this, we’re pleased to announce that the Zippie team has once again grown. We’re lucky to have Ru Cindrea in our team to run QA activities. Despite the fact she just joined Zippie, we have already automated end-to-end testing running with our CI system. Ru did a very good job by creating a test plan and now each release is tested more than ever before. Our testing process contains roughly the following 3 steps:

1. Continuous testing on development builds, both manual and automated. Usually, we report most bugs in this phase. When the release content is tested and there are no blocker bugs, we create a testing release.
2. Testing release is used for full manual test runs. At this point, we track and document all test cases (pass, failures, etc) per area, and we can later use that information to see how we progress from one version to another. We will also add automated end-to-end testing for testing releases. When a testing release is good enough, the final release is created
3. Final release is the ‘public release’ that will land on your device.

One reason why we haven’t pushed this release out earlier is that we really wanted to make sure that we test Zippie well enough to ensure its quality.

Known issues

Software is never ready, and therefore there are still a few issues we need to fix. Here are some of the most obvious:

• The same Zippie card can be linked to more than one device
• Pending transactions are shown only on one device if multiple devices are using the same Zippie ID
• Some devices, such as the Sony XA2, may require a super precise position for the card to be read. Furthermore, it may also take up to 2 seconds to actually read the card.
• Recovering an account with the Chrome desktop, as a new device, leads to the Verify button on the phone doing nothing
• The home toolbar active tab is not correct when receiving payment.
• The Add card flow already uses the new Zippie look, which conflicts with the existing style.
• We need to better inform users during ongoing migrations. For example, when a card is added to an existing ID, an account migration is executed.

What’s next?

We aim to have much shorter release cycles in the future. It’s the only way to improve our delivery times and become better with on-time estimations and in splitting work. Consequently, we’re aiming to make the next release on Friday 26th October with the following content.

• Recovery using Zippie card and an external app
• The new UI style implemented
• Remove enrolled device from the Security tab
• Under-the-hood improvements on the smart contract side
• Login with Zippie and wallet APIs available for dapp developers

So, that’s all for now. We hope you’re as happy with this release as we are. If you’ve got any questions, be sure to get in touch via our Telegram channel. You can also follow our progress and join our community on Twitter, Reddit and YouTube.