Shorter sign-up, and photos one tap closer
Signing up used to mean answering eight or nine questions before your first message: what you do, what you're here for, which other AIs you've used, where you heard about us, a starter prompt, and an offer to bring your memory over from ChatGPT or Claude. That's fine if you live in AI tools all day, but plenty of people just want to get in and ask something. So sign-up now asks for your name, your age and your account details, then one question: how familiar are you with AI assistants? If you pick "I use them every day", you get the full set of questions, because that's where they pay off: the chat learns your role and goals, and you can import what your old assistant knew about you. Pick anything else and you go straight to the chat. Nothing is lost by skipping, since Portail still learns about you as you talk to it, and Enhanced Context memory works the same either way. The second change is for phones. Attaching a photo on Android used to take four steps: the plus button, Files, the file manager, then a hunt for the gallery. The plus menu now has a Photos item above Files. On Android it opens the photo picker directly, and on iPhone it opens your photo library first. Files still takes every type we support, from PDFs and spreadsheets to source code, and pasting an image into the box works as before.
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Sign-up asks for your name, age and account, then how often you use AI. Only daily users get the longer questionnaire.
Everyone else lands in the chat right after that one question.
The plus menu in the chat has a new Photos item that opens your phone's gallery directly, with no detour through the file manager.
Portail v2.8.12 shipped on 2026-11-04 as a patch release focused on shorter sign-up, and photos one tap closer. Signing up used to mean answering eight or nine questions before your first message: what you do, what you're here for, which other AIs you've used, where you heard about us, a starter prompt, and an offer to bring your memory over from ChatGPT or Claude. That's fine if you live in AI tools all day, but plenty of people just want to get in and ask something. So sign-up now asks for your name, your age and your account details, then one question: how familiar are you with AI assistants? If you pick "I use them every day", you get the full set of questions, because that's where they pay off: the chat learns your role and goals, and you can import what your old assistant knew about you. Pick anything else and you go straight to the chat. Nothing is lost by skipping, since Portail still learns about you as you talk to it, and Enhanced Context memory works the same either way. The second change is for phones. Attaching a photo on Android used to take four steps: the plus button, Files, the file manager, then a hunt for the gallery. The plus menu now has a Photos item above Files. On Android it opens the photo picker directly, and on iPhone it opens your photo library first. Files still takes every type we support, from PDFs and spreadsheets to source code, and pasting an image into the box works as before. The work is recorded here because small releases are still product history. They change how people sign in, read responses, pay for access, share conversations, open files, or trust the system when something goes wrong.
The main changes were direct: sign-up asks for your name, age and account, then how often you use ai. only daily users get the longer questionnaire, everyone else lands in the chat right after that one question, and the plus menu in the chat has a new photos item that opens your phone's gallery directly, with no detour through the file manager. That list is intentionally plain. It names what changed without turning the release into theatre. When a release fixes a build, a redirect, a storage path, or a UI edge case, the value is often that users stop noticing the problem. The archive keeps that invisible work visible enough for future debugging and for anyone checking whether Portail has cared about the details over time.
This version also fits into the wider Portail contract. One account, one chat history, and one model picker only work if the smaller pieces keep their promises. Authentication has to fail clearly. Billing has to count honestly. Uploads have to arrive in a form models can read. Admin tools have to show the operator what happened instead of hiding it behind a blank screen. v2.8.12 moved that contract forward in its own narrow lane.
The screenshots attached to this entry show the public release record as it now appears on portail.cc. For older releases, this archive was rebuilt from the git history, package version changes, release modal text, and commit subjects. That means the page is honest about its source: it documents the shipped change and preserves the record going forward, even when the exact old production screen cannot be recreated from a single saved image.
The practical result is simple. Someone landing on this page can see the version number, date, release tier, headline, highlights, and a real rendered screenshot of the archive page. Search engines can index the post through the canonical URL, sitemap entry, and structured data. Future releases now have a standard to meet before deploy, so the history should get cleaner from here instead of fuzzier.