After four years of development the Android Jabber/XMPP client is mostly feature complete for now. However an instant messaging client in a federated ecosystem like Jabber is only as good as the rest of the ecosystem. The ecosystem needs good desktop clients, it needs good servers and good providers who maintain their servers and keep them up to date with the latest features. Conversations.im as an umbrella organization is about bringing improvements to that ecosystem. Partially by improving existing clients and servers but also by creating tools that aid server administrators to maintain their servers and that aid end users to pick a good, stable provider. Those tools include the XMPP Compliance Tester or the XMPP uptime monitor. We have a collection of ideas that we think will improve the end user experience, but we are also very open to hearing other ideas that we didn’t think of ourself. Have you always thought about creating a service that will look up phone numbers and return Jabber IDs or otherwise improve the discoverable of contacts? Great. Let us hear your ideas and we might be able to find a suitable mentor for you. Want to add a new feature to an existing client? Great we will put you in touch with the appropriate mentors. Want to start developing your own client? Probably not a very good idea since every platform already has a client that awaits your help.
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Twitter: Conversations puts a lot of focus on user experience so we encourage you to become a user of XMPP first. To become a user you need to:
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Download an XMPP client (Conversations on Android and Gajim or Dino on Windows and Linux)
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Create an account on an XMPP server. For startes we recommend creating an account on the conversations.im server. In both Gajim and Conversations you can tick the checkbox Create new account during initial setup.
After downloading a client and creating an account please join the conversations group chat (MUC) under the address: xmpp:[email protected]?join.
Details on what we expect the actual proposal to look like can be found at the bottom of our ideas page.
Please note that those ideas are only inspirations. You can submit any project proposal that you believe will bring value to the XMPP ecosystem. Be it tools that help server admins create better servers, add a specific feature to a specific XMPP server or client or tools that somehow improve the usability for end users. In a way we even appreciate it even more if you submit your own ideas instead of copy pasting one of ours because it shows that you have investment in the XMPP ecosystem.