[Ring] Roadmap for Ring

[Adrien Béraud]

Hi everyone, 
Today the Ring team discussed about the 2017 roadmap for Ring and we want to 
share our thoughts and major goals with the community. 

iOS
Development of an iOS version is ongoing.
The first version should only have text messaging support (expected within the 
next month), with audio/video calls coming soon afterward.

F-Droid
Most issues which prevented a successful build on F-Droid should now have been 
fixed.
We are working with the community to get Ring on F-Droid updated soon.
See https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/issues/808

Contact management
There is ongoing work on all clients to make the contact list and conversations 
separated per-account and to clarify contact management.
The conversation list will now be the same as the account contact list (and 
synched across devices) for the currently-selected account.
This feature is planned for the end of the year for most clients.

File transfer
There is ongoing work in the daemon to implement file-transfer.
Our current (ambitious) goal is to have file-transfer implemented in clients by 
the end of the year.

OpenDHT
There is ongoing work to implement a "DHT Proxy" feature, that will allow to 
use a remote OpenDHT node to perform operations on the distributed hash table,
instead of connecting directly to the distributed network.
Communication with the proxy uses an HTTP REST API for OpenDHT. OpenDHT will be 
able to act as both a proxy client and server and
will be able to switch between a local node and a proxy during runtime.
The OpenDHT REST API draft is described here:
https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/opendht/wiki/REST-API

An advantage of using a proxy node is that the proxy IP address will be exposed 
on the DHT instead of the client IP address.
It will also allow for the proxy to enventualy send push notifications to the 
client
on platforms where this is necessary to receive call/messages while the app is 
in the background (eg. iOS...).
In Ring using a proxy node will always remain optional and the proxy hostname 
will be configurable per-account.

Having an HTTP API will also allow to build Web apps using OpenDHT nodes.
This feature is planned for the end of the year.

Best regards,

Adrien Béraud
Ring project director
Savoir-faire Linux