User report from 2025: Both the application and web UI are still buggy and slow. This is not acceptable in an application this simple in nature, that has been around for so long.
For XMPP/Matrix/etc. there are plenty of (more) native alternatives but they're not as feature complete as Telegram or their Electron counterparts, unfortunately.
My lack of C++ and Qt experience has still managed to keep my urge to rip out the Telegram protocol and replace it with something else. Maybe I'll try throwing AI at the problem and release a slop POC. Secretly, I'm hoping someone else will do the hard work for me...
The mobile apps for all are fine, though. Electron hasn't hit mobile phones just yet.
If you're talking about the old Element Classic mobile app, then yes, it's now been replaced by Element X (which now has spaces & threads support, and so pretty much has parity with the old app), and it is super fast, and not buggy.
Also seems like spoiler messages in Element X appear as just an empty chat bubble that i’ve been meaning to report. And why does sending spoilers on Element require using /spoiler when discord and telegram use `||spoilered text||`?
I really want to love Matrix. I’ve been using it with my girlfriend (on a self hosted Synapse server for us) who barely tolerates it, some other friends who range from also tolerating it to hating it (and having decryption errors a lot with a friend who has several clients they switch between, mostly whenever I send a message from another client like when going from element to nheko). I bridge Telegram, Signal, and IRC to matrix (and probably will add more soon). I’m not sure why I care so much about this chat protocol, but I do for some reason and I really want to see it work.
The notification badge issue is this mess: https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/3151 and is almost solved (but not deployed yet).
Spoilers is https://github.com/element-hq/element-x-ios/issues/2839 but isn't really on our radar - please can you upvote / comment on it.
Thanks for keeping the faith :)
Really glad to hear that notification badges are almost fixed! I left an upvote on the spoilers issue but don’t really have anything to add other than it’s annoying to not have a way of even seeing the contents.
Edit: also, on macOS on Apple Silicon, you can use Element X on macOS as a desktop app, and it works impressively well.