User stuck at "waiting to be added to group"

Mutual Help
1

I got a group of non-technical friends to agree to try Delta Chat and I don’t want them to have to do debugging, so apologies if details are limited.

One user created a group chat and shared the invitation link with the group. Me and one other user were able to join using that link. A fourth user tried to join and sent me a screenshot of where they are stuck. Here is what they see on their screen:

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Wednesday, September 2, 2026

X invited you to join this group.
Waiting for the device of X to reply…

X replied, waiting for being added to the group…

I believe both parties are using iOS.

Here’s a relevant answer in another thread:

It can happen that the invite link you clicked on has already expired or the whole group has been dissolved by today. Please ask for a new one from a member or ask them to add you directly without an invite. Note that invitations are only processed while both ends are online.

Is it true that invitation links expire, and is there any way to know their expiration time? I don’t see any indication in the UI that there is an expiration date or what it is.

If invitations are only processed “while both ends are online,” does that mean the particular sender of the invitation link must be online, and not just anyone currently in the group? I believe (but can’t confirm) that Signal and WhatsApp allow users to join a group chat by clicking a link even if the sender is not online. Is there any hope of achieving parity with this in Delta Chat, either now or in the future?

I can confirm Delta Chat is much more user friendly than any of the other encrypted messaging platforms that don’t require a smartphone, but I am worried that I over-sold it as being easy and intuitive for non-technical people. Any help making it work for my group is greatly appreciated.

2

The response for that topic was for a little different situation. In your specific case, the person who has generated the invite link can reset the invite link anytime manually, and it will cease to work immediately.

Each member within the group is able to generate an invite link of their own. If you pass around all of these links together to the friend you want invited, they can join whenever at least one of the members are online. It will not expire by itself.

Note that it is just a small inconvenience that joining the first time may take up to 8 hours (until the sender wakes up). A workaround already exists by adding an invite bot to your group that ran on a server 24/7.

You also seem to have missed an important part of the cite: you can also directly add your friend to the group from the group member dialog. The effect of this will be immediate then.

3

In this case it has been a few days. Can you elaborate on where the 8 hour figure comes from?

The sender is on iOS so I wonder under what conditions Delta Chat gets to run automatically in the background and start automatically on boot. I think we can assume my friend didn’t manually reset their invite link but also didn’t do anything special to make sure Delta Chat could run in the background unless they were prompted to. I think we can also assume that their phone has been powered on in last few days, though they may not have manually opened Delta Chat because barely anybody is in the group chat yet.

If an iOS user follows the path of least resistance to install Delta Chat, make a group chat, and send an invitation link, then turns their phone off and later turns it on again, is it possible that their Delta Chat instance wouldn’t start automatically to complete the invitation handshake?

It’s not that I missed it, it’s just not relevant to my situation because the people being invited aren’t on Delta Chat yet. The onboarding process is of utmost importance and Delta Chat is significantly better than the alternatives I tested (Matrix/Element, Session, SimpleX), but I didn’t foresee this problem. In order for us to start using this group chat I need to give some updated instructions to help people join because the path of lease resistance seems to have failed. But I want to get the full story so I don’t keep telling people to do just one more thing that they didn’t have to do with Signal and then it will be so easy.

4

I don’t see how guessing randomly over here will help, but my guess is they have already uninstalled Delta Chat from their device by now.

The workflow I follow is to create all needed groups myself and invite others (i.e., then the uptime of my devices will matter, not their, and as I have a bunch of devices running, my uptime is quite high). Ideally, you should install DC together in person and make them scan your QR immediately so you will have at least one verified and secure chat together. From that point, you can add them to your groups without further round trips later on remotely.

Another alternative would be for one of you to send over your vCard that also does not require extra round trips, but that’s more for experts.

Reading your question again, I think the solution is quite clear. You should generate an invite link with your own profile and share that link again on the other platform for the remaining interested members to join. It’s not a problem to have multiple invite links to the same group active.

5

It is unfortunate that I don’t have access to the devices experiencing the issue. Rather than random guessing, I would like to find information about the iOS app’s ability to run in the background and start up on boot. Can you elaborate on why it might take 8 hours? Is the iOS app only be able to operate in the background at 8 hour intervals?

I would like to know more about that. Are you saying that sending an invite link + a vCard can allow someone to join without round trips, whereas just sending the invite link requires round trips? Are the round trips necessary for some security property or is it just due to the current state of development?

I don’t have access to the other platform, so a non-technical friend will need to be involved either way. If I’m asking people to try this new platform I want to be as up-front as possible about the inconveniences compared to Signal, so I want to understand them so that I can communicate them concisely without stringing my friends along more than I already have. When I ask them to share a new link I would like to be able to explain why the first attempt didn’t work and what they need to be aware of going forward if they ever want to invite new people to a group chat in the future.

6

Sleep takes 8 hours.

The secure join invite link requires a round trip so you can reset it and no further users would harass you through that link. Once your vCard gets leaked out, anyone could spam you at present, hence why I only recommend it to experts.

7

That is interesting. I wonder if the Signal protocol has a way around this, such that the user can delegate the role of invite sender to the server without compromising end-to-end security…

Ah, LOL! So what has to happen before and after sleep in order for the delay to be limited to 8 hours? :slight_smile:

8

This tells us that it’s probably not about the device being offline and not about the invite QR being “reset”, because then we wouldn’t get to this point, so this seems a bit weird to me.

Regarding iOS and push notifications see FAQ - Delta Chat.

9

Lost messages?