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I feel like the Element client is somehow lost in a sense. As far as my understanding goes, they are doing their third rewrite of mobile apps for whatever reaso

I feel like the Element client is somehow lost in a sense. As far as my understanding goes, they are doing their third rewrite of mobile apps for whatever reason (that has to be wasting a lot of developer time). And secondly they seem to be kinda stuck in terms of its vision. If they market towards companies - the search is still very bad, doesn't give any options (like search within a timeframe, search types of attachments etc... compare that to discord or slack e.g.), it's completly missing on mobile.. and generally sucks at showing attachments - seeing something from 3 months ago is incredibly annoying if you have hundreds of attachments, sometimes due to a bug even impossible. Hopefully slide sync and other stuff will adress all this filtering, searching and moving around a timeline quickly (going back a week ago? good luck). Also the amount of bugs as of late is quite worrying - after a year or two I am having issues with encryption all over the place, the notifications were buggy (maybe the version that's not showing up for me in the playstore already fixes that)... so I feel like the resources should be focused towards polishing and not rewriting everything again. And if gamers and home users are their niche and want to target those users - discord users were asking for custom emotes for years now and while a solution for stickers exist, it's not for emotes. Also I don't understand why pouring resources into its own videostreaming when jitsi seemed like a very good option already - again in my opinion should've been a low priority and scheduled for much later in the pipeline. Again I truly hope Matrix succeeds, but making a better experience, useability and polished product should be the focus now. While third party clients may have other features, it's Element that will be used the most by people, at the start at least.

Arathorn 4y ago
> As far as my understanding goes, they are doing their third rewrite of mobile apps for whatever reason It’s the first rewrite of the iOS app, which was 8 years old. And it unifies the android and iOS codebases at last, to stop having to implement everything twice on mobile. > (that has to be wasting a lot of developer time). no, it is already spectacularly reducing dev time; basically halving it. You can (re)read the explanation at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022#turbocharging-matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... > And secondly they seem to be kinda stuck in terms of its vision. The vision is pretty simple: radically fix perf, fix bugs by converging SDK, then add new features like encrypted search. Native VoIP is critical, given Jitsi’s encryption is beta and doesn’t interop with Matrix’s, nor is it decentralised, and we’d rather invest time otherwise spent maintaining large-scale Jitsi deployments making Matrix support VoIP out of the box. In terms of the recent Android notification bugs: yes, they should be fixed in 1.5.16, released 2 days ago. And they are precisely the sort of bugs we are addressing by unifying the mobile apps onto a single well-tested SDK.
- lousken 4y ago
  > It’s the first rewrite of the iOS app, which was 8 years old. And it unifies the android and iOS codebases at last, to stop having to implement everything twice on mobile. Not really sure about iOS, but I was thinking of android - there was the old element(riot), the current version(riotx?) and now the proof of concept. > You can (re)read the explanation at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... Sorry but I am still very confused about the naming, what is Element X, what is Element R. I am assuming Element web and mobile are the current stable versions but what's the difference between R and X is still not clear to me. > The vision is pretty simple: radically fix perf How? Are you going to keep developing both synapse and dendrite or are you planning to sunset synapse eventually and only develop dendrite? How close is dendrite to being stable and any plans for making migration guides between the two?
  - Alexqw85 4y ago
    The status of Dendrite and its position vs Synapse is covered a bit in the Holiday Update: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022#p2p--dendrite https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... The relevant section: > The interesting plot twist is that Dendrite development has ended up increasingly focusing on embedded matrix server use cases - particularly to power Peer-to-Peer Matrix, where clients require a server to be embedded within them. So while Synapse has ended up increasingly focusing on large-scale deployments, Dendrite has ended up pursuing smaller instances (which is ironic, given originally it was meant to be the other way round!).
  - Arathorn 4y ago
    Yes, it’s the 3rd new version of the android app, which is necessary to converge the ios and android apps together… to fix precisely the sort of stupid bugs which you were highlighting originally. Element X is the new app, which implements the new faster sync and is built for performance from the outset. Element R is an upgrade to the existing separate apps, which converges just the encryption on the new rust implementation, to minimise future encryption bugs by sharing the same code over all 3 platforms. In terms of fixing perf, the solution is to switch to the new sync API (which will be supported on both synapse and dendrite) and use the new client codebase. Synapse and Dendrite are relatively similar in performance in comparison. Synapse dev will continue; Dendrite dev will continue focusing on embedded servers. Dendrite is very close to being stable, and yes there will be migration guides.
omniscient_oce 4y ago
At least for me there's no way you could get buy in from others either work or friend groups without native built in screen-share which only just released a month ago or so in Element I think (well, it's in beta). When I tried it out the Screenshare modal would open and you could select a window to share but you couldn't click the share button, it just wouldn't do anything (very frustrating - no error just did nothing). That was pretty underwhelming but at least it was resolved in the update a weekish later. I'm pretty sure companies would be willing to pay for Matrix if it were cheaper than Slack for example. Like you I'd prefer to see a polishing of usability over new features.

Arathorn 4y ago

> As far as my understanding goes, they are doing their third rewrite of mobile apps for whatever reason It’s the first rewrite of the iOS app, which was 8 years old. And it unifies the android and iOS codebases at last, to stop having to implement everything twice on mobile. > (that has to be wasting a lot of developer time). no, it is already spectacularly reducing dev time; basically halving it. You can (re)read the explanation at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022#turbocharging-matrix https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... > And secondly they seem to be kinda stuck in terms of its vision. The vision is pretty simple: radically fix perf, fix bugs by converging SDK, then add new features like encrypted search. Native VoIP is critical, given Jitsi’s encryption is beta and doesn’t interop with Matrix’s, nor is it decentralised, and we’d rather invest time otherwise spent maintaining large-scale Jitsi deployments making Matrix support VoIP out of the box. In terms of the recent Android notification bugs: yes, they should be fixed in 1.5.16, released 2 days ago. And they are precisely the sort of bugs we are addressing by unifying the mobile apps onto a single well-tested SDK.

lousken 4y ago
> It’s the first rewrite of the iOS app, which was 8 years old. And it unifies the android and iOS codebases at last, to stop having to implement everything twice on mobile. Not really sure about iOS, but I was thinking of android - there was the old element(riot), the current version(riotx?) and now the proof of concept. > You can (re)read the explanation at https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... Sorry but I am still very confused about the naming, what is Element X, what is Element R. I am assuming Element web and mobile are the current stable versions but what's the difference between R and X is still not clear to me. > The vision is pretty simple: radically fix perf How? Are you going to keep developing both synapse and dendrite or are you planning to sunset synapse eventually and only develop dendrite? How close is dendrite to being stable and any plans for making migration guides between the two?
- Alexqw85 4y ago
  The status of Dendrite and its position vs Synapse is covered a bit in the Holiday Update: https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update-2022#p2p--dendrite https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-update... The relevant section: > The interesting plot twist is that Dendrite development has ended up increasingly focusing on embedded matrix server use cases - particularly to power Peer-to-Peer Matrix, where clients require a server to be embedded within them. So while Synapse has ended up increasingly focusing on large-scale deployments, Dendrite has ended up pursuing smaller instances (which is ironic, given originally it was meant to be the other way round!).
- Arathorn 4y ago
  Yes, it’s the 3rd new version of the android app, which is necessary to converge the ios and android apps together… to fix precisely the sort of stupid bugs which you were highlighting originally. Element X is the new app, which implements the new faster sync and is built for performance from the outset. Element R is an upgrade to the existing separate apps, which converges just the encryption on the new rust implementation, to minimise future encryption bugs by sharing the same code over all 3 platforms. In terms of fixing perf, the solution is to switch to the new sync API (which will be supported on both synapse and dendrite) and use the new client codebase. Synapse and Dendrite are relatively similar in performance in comparison. Synapse dev will continue; Dendrite dev will continue focusing on embedded servers. Dendrite is very close to being stable, and yes there will be migration guides.

omniscient_oce 4y ago

At least for me there's no way you could get buy in from others either work or friend groups without native built in screen-share which only just released a month ago or so in Element I think (well, it's in beta). When I tried it out the Screenshare modal would open and you could select a window to share but you couldn't click the share button, it just wouldn't do anything (very frustrating - no error just did nothing). That was pretty underwhelming but at least it was resolved in the update a weekish later. I'm pretty sure companies would be willing to pay for Matrix if it were cheaper than Slack for example. Like you I'd prefer to see a polishing of usability over new features.