Had a discussion with the @White Noise team about how they could improve especially in a security and privacy standpoint. The post and article below discuss a small part of the efforts made. These provide substantial security improvements while having no added overhead or friction to the user.
If your application handles media, it's important that functionality is sandboxed and designed in a memory safe language. White Noise currently isolates image decoding in this way but now this has also been expanded to animated images as well. You can find out more below.
Memory tagging (MTE), a ARM hardware exploit protection used heavily by GrapheneOS and latest generation iPhones are now opted in the app manifest. This makes it unable to be disabled in GrapheneOS and also enables it for capable phones enrolled in Android's Advanced Protection.
The issue tracker also now tracks working on a few improvements, including adding this sandbox for other types of attachments too. I've also discussed on a improving accessibility features.
White Noise for Android 2026.10.27 decodes GIF and WebP animation in a permissionless worker, away from account data and group keys, and requests native heap memory tagging checks on MTE-capable phones, so a malicious animated image has far less of your private data within reach. Thank you to @npub1hxx7...g75y for the conversations that inspired this hardening.
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