4 ms·

The State of Mobile XMPP in 2016

18 points by goffi 10y ago

Zash 10y ago
XMPP is alright. It will never be perfect, but it keeps improving, and that's important. Personally I believe more in having people be in control of their own communications than having ultra secure crypto. No crypto is going to help if a single actor can see all metadata or decide who is allowed to communicate. Therefore I strongly believe in federation and allowing everyone to choose their client, service and server.
tfar 10y ago
> But XMPP gives you another freedom. The freedom to choose your user experience. User experience describes the way we use something. I don't think users care about the freedom to choose the UX. They just want a good UX and that's it. > Slack in turn fails to provide a decent mobile experience. According the ratings of app stores, users are pretty happy with them. > PGP has been around in the XMPP community for several years but is currently being reworked into a more modern extension called XEP-0374: OpenPGP for XMPP Instant Messaging that promises to make the onboarding easier for novice users. I don't get how something OpenPGP will make onboarding any easier for XMPP. New XMPP users who might have an automatically generated account somewhere, still start with an empty contact list. Onboarding is definitely the key issue for mobile XMPP.
davecridland 10y ago
A device-global push protocol isn't entirely useless, since the device OS can wake all the clients at once if it needs to, synchronizing network activity. But I agree it's a significant overhead if you're able to just hold open the TCP session, as well as concentrating yet more information into a single entity you don't get to choose.
- inputmice 10y ago
  Push messages on GCM are going through immediately. The push server is not queuing up messages to send them all at once. I admit that could be helpful but Google is not doing this either. The alarm manager - where apps can schedule to be run at some point in the future - is in fact grouping those events together. But that happens entirely independent of GCM. The Alarm Manager is part of Android where as the push service is a proprietary Google service.
  - davecridland 10y ago
    Oh, okay - in that case I slouch corrected.
mynameislegion 10y ago
> XMPP just works everywhere. You only need one account to cater to all your instant messaging needs. If your workflow changes you just pick a different client. AFAIK, this is painfully wrong and one of the main reasons XMPP struggles. Nearly all of the modern 'messaging needs' are provided by the kind of XEPs mentioned in the article. If you don't have an account with a server that supports all of those XEPs, your needs will NOT be met. There is no easy way to tell if your server supports them, either. The situation is atrocious from a user perspective. As far as mass adoption is concerned, this puts XMPP so far out of the league of centralized IM that it's eating twizzlers in the parking lot. There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers. Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work. This lack of homogeneity between servers means users pile up in the 'better' servers, which is apparently the opposite of what federation is supposed to achieve (?). What if you want the freedom to switch from the Conversations server to a different public server but maintain the same feaureset? Good luck with your Google searches. Keep a table of your relevant XEPs nearby! I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity. In it's current state there is absolutely no way to convince the average user of XMPP's superiority. The experience is far too inconsistent. At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.
- inputmice 10y ago
  > There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers. That is completely untrue. First of all there are public servers that have exactly the same feature set like jabber.at second of all we are running ejabberd on conversations.im. ejabberd is open source can be run by anyone. You just have to do it. Granted the list of public servers with a full feature set is not as long as we'd like. But the best way of changing this is to run one yourself.
  - inputmice 10y ago
    It's impossible to get reliably statistics in a federated system. (Which of course is the entire point.) but looking at the little data I have from people sending me bug reports over XMPP at seems that a lot of Conversations users are running their own servers. The problem is not that the extensions are not implemented (Both prosody and ejabberd in fact support all the extensions Conversations does.) but that a lot of public servers out there are second class services for their operators and are not properly maintained. In that case you can either contact them and ask them to upgrade or ask yourself if you want to have an XMPP account on a provider who doesn't maintain their servers.

18 points by goffi 10y ago

Zash 10y ago

XMPP is alright. It will never be perfect, but it keeps improving, and that's important. Personally I believe more in having people be in control of their own communications than having ultra secure crypto. No crypto is going to help if a single actor can see all metadata or decide who is allowed to communicate. Therefore I strongly believe in federation and allowing everyone to choose their client, service and server.

tfar 10y ago

> But XMPP gives you another freedom. The freedom to choose your user experience. User experience describes the way we use something. I don't think users care about the freedom to choose the UX. They just want a good UX and that's it. > Slack in turn fails to provide a decent mobile experience. According the ratings of app stores, users are pretty happy with them. > PGP has been around in the XMPP community for several years but is currently being reworked into a more modern extension called XEP-0374: OpenPGP for XMPP Instant Messaging that promises to make the onboarding easier for novice users. I don't get how something OpenPGP will make onboarding any easier for XMPP. New XMPP users who might have an automatically generated account somewhere, still start with an empty contact list. Onboarding is definitely the key issue for mobile XMPP.

davecridland 10y ago

A device-global push protocol isn't entirely useless, since the device OS can wake all the clients at once if it needs to, synchronizing network activity. But I agree it's a significant overhead if you're able to just hold open the TCP session, as well as concentrating yet more information into a single entity you don't get to choose.

inputmice 10y ago
Push messages on GCM are going through immediately. The push server is not queuing up messages to send them all at once. I admit that could be helpful but Google is not doing this either. The alarm manager - where apps can schedule to be run at some point in the future - is in fact grouping those events together. But that happens entirely independent of GCM. The Alarm Manager is part of Android where as the push service is a proprietary Google service.
- davecridland 10y ago
  Oh, okay - in that case I slouch corrected.

mynameislegion 10y ago

> XMPP just works everywhere. You only need one account to cater to all your instant messaging needs. If your workflow changes you just pick a different client. AFAIK, this is painfully wrong and one of the main reasons XMPP struggles. Nearly all of the modern 'messaging needs' are provided by the kind of XEPs mentioned in the article. If you don't have an account with a server that supports all of those XEPs, your needs will NOT be met. There is no easy way to tell if your server supports them, either. The situation is atrocious from a user perspective. As far as mass adoption is concerned, this puts XMPP so far out of the league of centralized IM that it's eating twizzlers in the parking lot. There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers. Otherwise, most of the XMPP featureset they offer simply doesn't work. This lack of homogeneity between servers means users pile up in the 'better' servers, which is apparently the opposite of what federation is supposed to achieve (?). What if you want the freedom to switch from the Conversations server to a different public server but maintain the same feaureset? Good luck with your Google searches. Keep a table of your relevant XEPs nearby! I think there needs to be incentive built into the protocol for all servers to maintain a baseline of XEP parity. In it's current state there is absolutely no way to convince the average user of XMPP's superiority. The experience is far too inconsistent. At least Matrix can provide a clean slate.

inputmice 10y ago
> There's a reason that everyone using Conversations essentially has to use a server that is maintained by the developers. That is completely untrue. First of all there are public servers that have exactly the same feature set like jabber.at second of all we are running ejabberd on conversations.im. ejabberd is open source can be run by anyone. You just have to do it. Granted the list of public servers with a full feature set is not as long as we'd like. But the best way of changing this is to run one yourself.
- inputmice 10y ago
  It's impossible to get reliably statistics in a federated system. (Which of course is the entire point.) but looking at the little data I have from people sending me bug reports over XMPP at seems that a lot of Conversations users are running their own servers. The problem is not that the extensions are not implemented (Both prosody and ejabberd in fact support all the extensions Conversations does.) but that a lot of public servers out there are second class services for their operators and are not properly maintained. In that case you can either contact them and ask them to upgrade or ask yourself if you want to have an XMPP account on a provider who doesn't maintain their servers.