Sure some people don’t find their chat history valuable. I do though and so do many others, it contains valuable information and memories. Is it the end of the world if it disappears? No, but it still sucks.
One day we will have a popular open protocol and client for instant messaging. One day…
There are some preconditions, it's not the easiest, but "no 3rd party" required so to speak
There has been a "Chat export" option for years. I even exported a chat of mine and ran it through some sentiment analysis for fun.
> shared / imported history between iOS and Android
Yeah this is perplexing. Android to android it works fine. The moment you throw Ios into the mix it gets complicated.
You've to do it manually for every chat, and it lacks all media. From the context of preserving your chat history, it's just marginally better than having nothing.
Except where they disable it, like in Germany (but haven't followed up on that story if it was resolved)
edit: seems to no longer be the case, time to run some backups!
We have. It's called Matrix.
Note that sometimes new standards are promoted specifically to destroy an existing open standard. The trick is to push hard for the new standard until it gets sort of popular and then back off. Adjust as required to keep things balanced.
Why? Unlike Matrix it's actually an Internet Standard.
But if I would have to bet on a standard which could become it right now, then it would be Matrix.
It convinces when it comes to adoption, concept, features and growth.
Should this be fixed (e.g. through regulation), XMPP is absolutely a sound choice - given, as you say, its 20 years of experience, evolution and deployment track record.
In theory, you could achieve with it what Matrix achieves, but it would probably be more feasible to start from scratch - like Matrix did
That said, I see how it currently has advantages when it comes to resource consumption as well as internal deployment to centralized services.