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Two things changed that a user would notice. Cordial now obtains the Roblox build on its own, verified, from a button; and this is the first release that carries a file you can download. The startup freeze is not fixed. It is worse understood than it was, which is not the same thing, and §What is still broken says exactly where it stands including two fixes that were announced and retracted in a single day. Read it before installing if you are signed in.

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Cordial downloads Roblox

Press Download Roblox on first run and it fetches the Android build, checks it, and starts. No second program, no manual APK, nothing to find. What it checks, because “download” should not mean “trust whatever arrives”:
  • The archive must be signed by Roblox’s own signing certificate. A mirror that alters a byte is refused, not used.
  • An archive whose v3 signature has been stripped to force the weaker v2 path is refused too. That attack works by deleting the newer signature block and relying on the verifier to fall back quietly; the scheme-3 stripping attestation (0xbeeff00d) is now read and a claimed-but-missing scheme is a refusal.
  • Downloads never land anywhere that belongs to another application. A build found in Sober’s directory is read where it lies and never written to.
If you already have Sober, nothing changes and nothing is pressed — Cordial finds that build and uses it in place. The mirror is APKPure and it is a third party: it can be down, and it sees who asked. That is why it is a button rather than something that happens to you.

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You can download Cordial

AppImage, .deb, .rpm and an Arch package, built in CI on every push and attached to this release. Until now every release carried nothing at all. The Flatpak workflow did know how to attach a bundle on a tag, but every run it ever had was a push to main, so that path had never once fired. The AppImage is the one to take if your distribution is not in that list, or if you would rather not add a third-party Flatpak remote. It installs nothing. It is also the least proven artifact here — see below. Flatpak remains the recommendation for anyone without a reason to prefer otherwise: it is sandboxed and it updates itself.

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Updates

  • The updater reports the newest build compatible with your machine, not the newest build the mirror happens to hold. An announcement you cannot run is not an update.
  • The update badge clears once you have installed the update, rather than staying lit at something you already did.
  • Cancel a download and Cordial remembers where you stopped.
  • Cordial notices when the installed build changed underneath it, so a build that arrived from elsewhere is no longer invisible to the updater.

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Audio

An OSS backend joins PipeWire, PulseAudio and ALSA, selected with CORDIAL_AUDIO_HOST. It was asked for and the asking was the condition. PipeWire remains the default and is the one measured against a control.

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Plugins

A core event bus: Cordial publishes what it observes — launches, joins, updates — and a plugin may listen. It may not veto, delay, or alter anything, by construction rather than by policy. Building it found two bugs in the existing plumbing, which is the usual argument for building a thing properly.

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Smaller things you might hit

  • Cordial says when the disk is nearly full. A game that dies because it could not write used to say nothing, anywhere, and the engine will not mention it either.
  • Ctrl+V no longer pastes twice.
  • A password box now tells input methods that it is one.
  • The settings and update windows moved off a deprecated libadwaita window type; the update dialog follows the HIG for progress rather than swapping the button out from under you.
  • NOTICE now ships in every package. third_party/mocktail-webview/ is Apache-2.0 material and §4(d) requires that file to travel with binary distributions; no package built before this one included it. That was a licence compliance gap in everything shipped to date.

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What is still broken

The startup freeze, on a signed-in profile. The client opens, reaches the signed-in home screen, presents one frame and then spins. It is not fixed. What is now known: it is render-side and happens after the app is ready — the engine reports reaching its root screen in frozen runs too. It correlates strongly with machine load. Across forty-five interleaved runs, eighteen consecutive launches were healthy at a load average of 0.66 and twenty-one of the next twenty-seven froze between 1.9 and 3.8 (p = 7.9e-08), across every arm at once. Two fixes were announced and withdrawn on 2026-08-27. One “cured” it by not rendering at all — photographed, a blank grey window, which the survey scored healthy because its verdict counts presented frames and an empty surface presents faster than a real one. The other measured p = 0.0005 against a control taken an hour earlier and p = 1.00 against one measured beside it. Both are recorded rather than quietly deleted. If you are hit by it, closing and reopening usually works, and a machine that is not otherwise busy freezes far less. A black canvas inside an experience. Joining works; what you see once you are there frequently does not. Voice chat does not work. The uplink is hooked and the microphone stays shut; there is no downlink. No gamepad or controller support. None, rather than partial. The engine exports the natives and nothing here calls them yet. The AppImage’s web view is unconfirmed. It bundles WebKitGTK’s helper executables by hand, because they are spawned rather than linked and the standard tooling does not follow them. If the sign-in window comes up blank, that is why — the Flatpak is unaffected, and it is worth reporting rather than assuming Cordial is broken. Nothing is signed. Not the Flatpak remote, not any of the four new package formats. What that does and does not protect you from is in the README, and it is not hidden.

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Thanks

Sober, again and specifically. Its issue tracker is why several bugs here were recognised instead of investigated, its APK path is why Cordial finds a build you already have, and it went first while it was much harder. No Sober code was taken and none could be.