Instant messaging apps / protocols

Aren't there already well identified apps for each protocol that we could support? (Flare, Fractal, Dino)

@Silmathoron just for completeness sake, I started from basics. For XMPP, I agree Dino seems best.

Other options,

1. Chatty - omemo broken and libpurple unmaintained / being rewritten. So it will take much longer before it is in a healthy state.

2. Gajim - maintainer explicitly rejected adaptive / responsive ui.

3. Kaidan - omemo 2, so not compatible with actively maintained apps.

I will start with XMPP as that is what I personally prefer.

So far the best option seems to be Dino - it fits on mobile screen and works reasonably well / actively maintained.

For Dino,

1. Most annoying missing feature is lack of moderation support. You feel helpless when there is a spam / obscene image posted in a public group.

2. Missing support for giving owner / admin privileges when creating a group.

3. Easy on boarding with Quicksy / Prav (sign up with sms otp and discover contacts using phone directory)

Just my personal opinion: I would concentrate on Signal and Matrix due to the number of people using it. Matrix is already very well covered by Fractal, not much to do for mobile except small details. Signal works on e.g. tje FLX1 with their waydroid fork well but sharing of e.g. pictures is ofc only possible within the android "world" or quite complicated via the shared folder with the linux. A native app would be awesome ofc but a huge effort.

@Marius cost and effort of maintaining a matrix server is very high compared to xmpp due to its design choices - keeping all history/state changes by default, duplicating it on all participating servers and then merging changes back. I don't think matrix vs xmpp debate would be settled anytime soon.

I actually did not know about Flare, will try it out!

In addition to XMPP and Matrix, what about adding Chatmail? https://delta.chat/en/chatmail Fast e2ee chats over email!

@Fossman we will have to support multiple apps / protocols as I don't think picking just one will be useful. So you can try to list out missing features and prioritize them. Once you identify priority missing features, you can try setting up bounties.

Having used Mobian for a bit, I'm a bit more in favour of Chatty now since it requires keeping only one app running in the background instead of different ones for XMPP and Matrix.

Unfortunately the support for those protocols is not yet very stable. OMEMO encryption for XMPP is broken and the XMPP backend hasn't been updated for a while (it's currently looking for a maintainer); Matrix is better but doesn't yet support starting new chats. But maybe we can direct resources to make it work if we're interested. (I heard that OMEMO is working reasonably well in Pidgin, which uses the same libpurple backend as Chatty).

On the other hand if Unified Push is implemented then requiring multiple apps won't be as big of a deal (although it'll still be nice in some ways)