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Comment by Whatitat90 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that you compare Riot with Conversations as Conversations feels and looks much better to me (native UI) while Riot for Android always gave me the webapp feel. But Riot works consistently on all OSes while Conversations (in my opinion the best free/federated messenger to date) is available only on Android.

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Riot/Android is a completely native app, but it grew pretty organically and is far from perfect. We're in the final stages of replacing it with a rewrite in Kotlin nicknamed RiotX, which should be unrecognisably better: https://github.com/vector-im/riotX-android.

Any such plans for Mac and iOS app too?

And any plans of design overhaul in a way that it appeals to the end user too (something people could use as an alternative to WhatsApp and Telegram) along with it being used as an IRC/Discord/Slack alternative?

Riot/iOS is already native, and works pretty well, so will likely evolve to behave more like RiotX as time goes on rather than getting rewritten.

RiotX is trying to be something that starts off feeling like WhatsApp or Telegram, but can expand into IRC/Discord/Slack for powerusers. Who knows if it'll work.

For native desktop apps, there are a bunch of other Matrix clients focused specifically on that domain - e.g. https://neilalexander.dev/seaglass and https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Fractal and https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko and https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion. Riot/iOS might expand into Riot/macOS though in future (although this is basically what Seaglass is already).

Thanks. Will check RiotX on my work Android phone and will wait for the design philosophy to move to iOS.

> https://neilalexander.dev/seaglass

This looked really good when I tried last but it was really unstable and lacking features. Will check again. PS. That link isn't working - this one does https://github.com/neilalexander/seaglass

> Riot works consistently on all OSes while Conversations (in my opinion the best free/federated messenger to date) is available only on Android.

That's my point. Riot works everywhere, without configuration hell. The Android client is getting better and better.

> without configuration hell.

As long as you're a matrix.org user

if you're not a matrix.org user, you either enter your full mxid to discover your server, or manually enter your homeserver's URL in Advanced. if this isn't working, please yell...

Yelling... repeatedly, both inband and out of band. You never responded last time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19865151

Manually entering homeserver URLs is a non-starter unless you're a technical user.

sorry, i missed your response on the other thread; will answer there.

Logging in with @cyphar:cyphar.com works for me. I host my own homeserver so I did have to set it up, but if you are using someone else's homeserver that is all you need to do. The homeserver and identity server information is all provided with the new .well-known/matrix/client support.

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