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Comment by xinayder | Hacker News Reader

I've been using it for over 2 years now and I agree there's a spam problem on public chatrooms.

However, what's making me want to quit is that for more than 3 months now, message notifications have been completely broken on Android (Element X and its forks), and there's no fix for it. I completely miss out on important things and now have to build the habit of opening Element X once or twice every 15 minutes, so that it loads the messages from the server, and shows what people have been messaging me lately.

I no longer get message notification details on my phone, instead a generic "you have new messages" pop-up. There are at least 6 issues on GitHub detailing the same issue, but there isn't a fix and it looks like this is not a priority for the development team right now, even though it makes Element X practically unusable.

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In my experience, Element X was released long before it was ready, and I still think it's far from ready. I've been using Element on android and it's been wonderful. Can't speak for iOS.

Element X is fine on iOS, but I wish it had regular updates. It feels like it has stagnated. There is still a feature gap for it to catch up with regular Element on iOS.

Dev on EXI has been focused on:

* event cache, to speed up room load and provide offline support. this was a huge amount of “invisible” work.

* media browsing - swiping between images, using the event cache

* fixing voip integration

* loads of trust & safety features

* threads (now in labs)

* spaces (in active dev)

* search (in active dev)

I agree that it feels like dev has slowed since the initial sprint to launch, but there’s another wave of features landing in the coming months.

Sweet. Many, many thanks.

I agree this has been a problem for years and it's very frustrating.

The fix I found that works for me (at least if you're using Unified Push like ntfy) is to go into ntfy and delete all the Element subscriptions in there. Force close and reopen Element, which will automatically remake them.

That fixes the issue, at least for a long time. About once a year I need to redo the ritual.

Hopefully this helps you.

I use Firebase (GCM) and it also doesn't work. But I'll try using ntfy next.

I assume this is https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-android/issues/4880. Obviously push should be reliable on Android; on Element X iOS it’s rock solid these days. I’ve escalated the issue internally (it wasn’t on my radar, irritatingly).

You might want to look into Unified Push. Although you need to use a Unified Push server that supports the differing Matrix endpoints because for some reason the Matrix devs decided to do their own thing. I wouldn't call using Unfied push with Matrix reliable, just like nothing with Matrix is ever truly reliable, but it works much better than native notifications for me.

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