Internet Identity release cadence

Developers internet-identity
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1

TL;DR

Internet Identity is moving to a faster release cadence, with up to two release proposals per week.

Dear NNS community and Internet Identity upgrade proposal reviewers,

Historically, Internet Identity has followed a weekly release cycle: release proposals were typically submitted on Fridays, with DFINITY voting on the following Monday, allowing approximately three days for community review.

Over the past year, the team has significantly increased its development velocity. This has been driven by three main factors:

  1. We addressed major sources of technical debt that had been slowing development. In particular, we migrated all applications from the legacy Internet Identity frontend to the new experience at https://id.ai and split the Internet Identity canister into separate backend and frontend canisters, improving separation of concerns, maintainability, and testability.

  2. We adopted AI-accelerated development as a standard engineering practice, improving developer productivity across implementation, testing, documentation, and code review.

  3. We expanded the team with a third full-time engineer, @MRmarioruci, who joined recently and has already been making valuable contributions.

As a result, waiting an additional three to four days before shipping improvements often no longer makes sense. To deliver features, fixes, and usability improvements to users more quickly, we plan to adopt the following release cadence:

  • Friday — Primary release proposal. This proposal is expected to be submitted nearly every week and will generally contain larger changes.

  • Monday — If no blockers are identified during community review, we will recommend that DFINITY vote in favor of adopting the primary release proposal.

  • Monday–Tuesday — Secondary release proposal. This proposal may be submitted when suitable changes are available on the main branch, such as feature-flagged functionality, small UX improvements, or other low-risk enhancements that would benefit users sooner.

  • Wednesday–Thursday — If no blockers are identified during community review, we will recommend that DFINITY vote in favor of adopting the secondary release proposal.

As a general practice, we will continue to avoid Friday deployments whenever possible.

Both primary and secondary releases may consist of a single canister upgrade proposal (for example, only the backend or only the frontend) or proposals for both canisters.

We believe this cadence strikes a good balance between rapid delivery and maintaining sufficient time for community review.

Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions regarding this change.

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Cc @b3hr4d and @4eku

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This is great news. I hope to see DFINITY take this kind of action on all proposal topics. Please don’t hesitate to implement improvements to the network.

4

Shouldn’t the currently elected grantees get compensated for more work, as it seems like more hours are needed to review proposals that fell into this topic category ? Or is this something we should ask on the dedicated Grants thread ?

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I recommend all grantees, and anyone who wants to be a grantee, take an ownership mindset and go to DFINITY directly and ask for an opportunity to get properly compensated for performing review work. The worst thing we did with respect to community reviews was to make it a public competition for very limited resources. The truly qualified and motivated people will identify an opportunity and make a proposal for how they can fill the need. It’s DFINITY’s money and DFINITY’s decision, so why not go to them directly with a proposal.

6

Thanks for the heads up and for tagging us.

From my side, I definitely support a faster release cadence for Internet Identity. The latest II updates are quite significant, especially around recovery emails, the redesigned sign-in / sign-up experience, OpenID-related flows, certified attributes, and the overall direction toward making onboarding and account recovery much easier for normal users.

I’m deeply building on top of Internet Identity and following these features closely, so for me this is not only about reviewing proposals. Understanding where II is going, how features like validated/certified email, one-click style signup, and recovery improvements are evolving is very important for downstream builders as well. These changes can have a big impact on how we design user onboarding, account recovery, identity verification, and wallet/payment flows on top of ICP.

I’m also working on the next version of ic-reactor, where one of my goals is to make it much easier for React developers to integrate with these new Internet Identity capabilities. I’m also thinking about how to optimize the developer experience for AI-assisted development, so both human developers and coding agents can understand and use these flows more safely and efficiently.

So overall, I see the increased cadence as a positive sign. It shows that II is moving faster, and I think that is very important for the ecosystem.

7

we will soon publish an announcement regarding the proposal grants and we definitely recognize that the compensation between ACM and PCM is currently unbalanced. so no need to ask about it separately :wink: