While @suraj_sloth is working on the #UnifiedPush connector side in #Chatty I got a chance to add the code for registering/unregistering #Matrix push gateways in #libcmatrix and Chatty (with this I can readily round trip messages up to the UP distributor):
@agx @suraj_sloth Awesome work! I personally still miss Signal for my usage but this is a huge step towards actually usable Linux phones! :)
@gamey @suraj_sloth We picked Matrix as it has server side protocol support already. This way we can get a foothold that is (once more complete and merged) already useful to users while we can work on improving the bits on the phones (to e.g. allow for wakeup/sleep cycles).
This wouldn't work with signal (https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/12490) so convincing upstream that this would be good to have would be an important step.
@agx @suraj_sloth [1/2] I am aware of the issues with Signals willingness to collaborate with other open source projects and especially third party clients so this isn't very surprising to me. It's my messenger of choice to contact friends and family tho so I need a good Signal app with push notifications, preferably UnifiedPush instead of their unreliable solution. I do wonder how Molly dose things and if that could be used, they managed to implement it somehow!
https://molly.im/
@agx @suraj_sloth [2/2] When Linux phones where new I did blame Purism for their broken promise of Signal support in Chatty but since then I looked into third party Signal clients and how upstream tends to tread them and definitely understand why it never happened. Furthermore there was the Libpurple disaster which turned out to be far less universal than it seemed, you guys could have done more research upfront but it happened the way it did and I understand the reasons behind it all.
@agx @suraj_sloth I still hope for a universal chat app some day because I fell in love with the idea long before Chatty and let's be real, it's a awesome fantasy! :)
@gamey @suraj_sloth It would be *very* nice to have support for more common protocols in one app. It's not an easy task though and needs folks working on it.
Modern chat apps include video and audio calls, etc. That's a lot of stuff to churn on. Things like libpurple or Matrix's Rust SDK can help here to some extend but it needs people diving into it 😃 So contributions are welcome.
@agx @suraj_sloth Even just basic text chats would be awesome to have in one app but yea, people definitely expect more from their chat apps now days! I feel like there would be a chance if bigger projects like KDE and Gnome joined the efforts but I don't know if they are interested in such a project in the first place. It's definitely a huge task and will probably actually loose importance once the EUs DMA is implemented properly, at least for me as European citizen!