Auto-update could not work at all: the installer was 189 MB because it carried
the local speech engine and ffmpeg, and the download feed rejects uploads over
about 100 MiB, so update metadata could never be published.
The installer now leaves those components out and the app fetches them the first
time they are needed, verifying every part and the joined archive before
installing. The installer is 90.6 MiB, the update feed is published again, and
updates stay small because the engine is not re-sent on every release.
The fetch is visible and recoverable: the download runs with progress, a failed
install cleans up after itself, and Settings > STT shows the runtime status with
a manual download action for when the automatic one cannot run.
The manual install path still needed 7-Zip, which the target machine does not
have, so "installable without a certificate" was not yet true.
The channel now also publishes the app as byte-split zip parts, and the install
script joins them and extracts with the built-in Windows Expand-Archive after
verifying every part and the joined archive. Version 1.3.1 republishes the
channel from a single build, because a version's artifacts can only match one
build and published volumes are never overwritten.
Installers could not be published at all: the signing certificate does not
exist yet, and the release pipelines stop at their signing guard. Users had no
way to install a fixed build, so the product was effectively stuck behind a
certificate that takes weeks to obtain.
There is also a second, independent blocker: the download feed sits behind
Cloudflare, which rejects any upload body over about 100 MiB, and the app with
its speech engine exceeds that even when signed.
A portable channel now publishes what can actually be delivered today: the app
compressed into 95 MiB 7z volumes (162 MiB total instead of 243 MiB), a Scoop
bucket for a normal install and uninstall experience, and a verifiable manual
installer script. It is deliberately separate from the auto-update feed, needs
no certificate, and refuses to overwrite an already published version.
Local dictation had never produced a transcript on an installed build. The
engine itself was healthy; every connection to it was broken.
Installed builds shipped no speech engine at all: the packaging config had no
entry for the faster-whisper sidecar and no pipeline step built one, so the app
always fell back to a system Python without the runtime. Development was broken
too, because the sidecar and SoX paths were resolved against the Vite output
directory instead of the app root, which also meant recording failed with a SoX
ENOENT. On hosts where localhost resolves only to IPv6, every local request was
refused outright, which silently disabled both local transcription and the local
LLM.
The sidecar is now built and bundled (including the Silero VAD data it needs),
gated by a packaging check that fails when the engine or its data is missing.
Paths are discovered from the app root and fail loudly when the engine is
absent. Local engine URLs are normalized to the IPv4 loopback, decoding is tuned
so repeated hallucinations cannot compound (the same transcript now takes about
a fifth of the time), the engine is warmed up at startup, and holding the hotkey
now shows the text forming live in the recording tip.
The changelog still described unreleased work under 1.1.0, which was already
published with its own notes. Those notes are restored verbatim for history,
and the new work has its own 1.2.0 section that the feed publisher will turn
into release notes.
The release guide, infrastructure map, and mobile SSOT now carry the 1.2.0
identity, state that installer binaries are distributed through the feed and
never committed, and record that the published 1.1.0 installer is unsigned and
is being superseded rather than rewritten. Backlog entries cover the remaining
external signing and token secrets.
Release notes for 1.1.0 were split between an Unreleased section and the
version section, so the published notes would have omitted the update-feed
and desktop changes. Everything shipping in this version now sits under one
`## [1.1.0]` heading.
`docs/map/` becomes the entry point for what infrastructure exists per
platform and how far each feature is developed, with a documented update
protocol so feature work and this map do not drift apart again. The release
guide now states that installer binaries live in the update feed rather than
the repository.
