This file will be renamed to 2026-reliable-channel-api-developer-preview

Resources Required for 2026H1:

  • 2 Delivery engineers
  • 1 Chat engineer for integration

The Chat — Foundations milestone does not include the Scalable Data Sync protocol. This milestone delivers dedicated work to fully leverage SDS to:

  • Identify and retrieve missed messages
  • Track, acknowledge, and resend unacknowledged messages

The Reliable Channel API delivers a simple API that enables those features, as well as:

  • SDS-Repair, an extension to SDS that reduces reliance on Store services and improves receiver anonymity from the original SDS protocol.

This milestone focuses on forming the API and delivering a pre-configured SDS experience. Segmentation and rate limit manager will be delivered in the General Availability milestone.

FURPS

Risks

Risk(Accept, Own, Mitigation)
SDS maturitySDS protocol has not been extensively tested in production. May require tuning of parameters to avoid network saturation.
SDS-Repair network overheadSDS-R can quickly saturate the network with repair requests if parameters are not carefully tuned. Linear backoff should become exponential.

Deliverables

Deliver Reliable Channel API

Owner: Delivery Team

Feature: Reliable Channel API

FURPS:

  • F1. All messages sent in a channel are eventually received by all participants.
  • F2. Senders are notified when messages are acknowledged by other participants.
  • F3. Missing messages are automatically detected.
  • F4. Missing messages are automatically retrieved via store hash queries.
  • F5. Messages are causally ordered using Lamport timestamps.
  • F6. Outbound messages that are not acknowledged are automatically resent.
  • F7. API delegates message encryption and decryption to consumer-provided implementations.
  • F8. When encryption is applied, the SDS envelope is encrypted.
  • U1. Sane defaults with pre-configured parameters for common scenarios.
  • U2. Single cohesive interface wrapping SDS and store queries for missing messages.
  • U3. Event-driven model exposing message lifecycle through intuitive events.
  • U4. The API is agnostic to the encryption mechanism used.

Note: No segmentation or rate limit manager in this milestone. SDS messages cached locally.

Implement SDS Repair

Owner: Delivery Team

Feature: Reliable Channel API

FURPS:

  • F9. Missing messages re-emission is requested from other channel participants

Use Reliable Channels in Logos Chat

Owner: Chat Team

Feature: Reliable Channel API

FURPS:

  • U2. Single cohesive interface wrapping SDS, store queries, segmentation, and rate limits.