So we have consensus - early January 2020 is when Status v1 will go live. 
We’re now closing out remaining bugs, finishing the new /send and /request command GUI, and mitigating certain reports from the Trail of Bits audit.
Additionally, we’re doing a bit of preparation for app upgradeability and backwards compatibility once v1 is live.
You can view a pretty comprehensive demo of v1 and all its bells and whistles in this awesome recording by Andrey.
That music choice in the video, that’s a pretty obscure jazz record 
( Hiroshi Suzuki - Cat (1975) for those who’d like to have a listen)
It’s been a minute since I updated this thread! What a blur.
Last week was the target deadline to have our release cut ready. We are a week overdue, but we’re close and still targeting a Jan 2nd or 3rd app store submission.
Chu, Sergey and I have been dogfooding steadily for the past several weeks and reported a handful of new issues. The best overview of our remaining issues is the v1 release label in Github. With Christmas and New Years ahead, I’d like to cull this list further.
One concerning issue became apparent as we started using Keycard with Samsung Galaxy devices. It seems that cards are being wiped when we try to recover them, on Galaxy devices in particular. We’re investigating.
Today we fixed a critical issue with DApps not appearing on https://dap.ps. We’re very close to being prepared for app upgradeability, fixing a lack of transaction history when there are too many Txs, replacing Infura with Cloudflare, and shipping the new chat command flow as well.
Huge kudos to the team on working so diligently during these past few weeks. We’ll be excited to have this scope wrapped and v1 out the door. 
It is now January 13 and there are still a lot of issues open here Issues · status-im/status-mobile · GitHub - are we going to release v1 in January or what’s going on?
Yes, good reminder that a public update is overdue.
We just merged chat commands, and from my POV, we’re ready to submit to the stores.
We have important fixes coming to transaction history, which are close. But I’d like to go ahead and submit a build tomorrow so we can get a response from Apple & Google ASAP. We’ll also distribute this build internally and to our ambassadors for dogfooding.
Any show stopping bugs will be addressed before we release publicly. I’m in close contact with Jonny & team about our launch plan, and going over it today with the product team so we can discuss user support.
FWIW I attribute our tardiness to a) run-of-the-mill underestimation, combined with b) the holiday vortex slowing us down and exacerbating the discrepancy between our estimates and reality.
Although we’ve been estimating story points in a spreadsheet, I’m looking into ways that we can have more accurate, data-driven timlines—likely using a tool like Fogbugz, which Andre is a big fan of.
Follow up after our launch call yesterday:
The marketing plan includes press in crypto-centric publications, our traditional social channels, support from the ambassadors and a few AMAs and interviews with Carl & Jarrad.
To support the launch, we’ve prepared a user guide, added a glossary to the profile screen, and we are updating the FAQ.
We have data on unique peer IDs (roughly equivalent to users or at least their devices) ready to monitor.
Chu, Sergey, Andre and I are joining forces to test open PRs today.
When we go live, we’ll offer user support in #status in a fairly ad hoc fashion. I’m in Asia, the bulk of the team is in Europe, André/Corey/Jonny are on the east coast, and I believe Andy is even on the west coast—so if we all agree to check #status a few times a day, we’ll be well covered.
Questions, concerns, etc. welcome.
Quick, but happy, update:
CCs & ambassadors: stay tuned for directions on how to dog food coming today.
We also revised our launch marketing strategy. We feel great about the progress being made on the Waku project—which will help Status scale to more users by a) reducing bandwidth consumption for users who opt in, and b) making it possible to support a higher number of users on chat—but as the project’s completion is still weeks away, we need to be mindful about not overloading the protocol on launch.
Thus, we’ll communicate v1’s availability only via our traditional channels: social media, ambassadors, our blog, etc. We will not aim for any PR or media coverage.
It’s critically important to us that we deliver on our promise to get v1 into our community’s hands, and we’re thrilled to be nearing this milestone very soon.
Hi all!
Testing is going well. We created a new release candidate today (RC3) with bug fixes from last week.
No major new issues have been identified, and we’re busy making last minute adjustments and troubleshooting a slow connection issue when the device is reawakened from sleep.
The issue count for v1 release is currently at 8 little issues.
We’re feeling good about the state of things. More updates to come soon.