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Comment by bdkoepke | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why ChatSecure by the guardian project never comes up in these discussions: https://guardianproject.info/apps/chatsecure/

It uses Otr for encrypted chat, so you can use any otr client for the other side of the chat. I personally use pidgin on my laptop and ChatSecure on my cell. It currently supports at least iOS and Android, which encompasses most people that I know.

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If I recall correctly the issue with ios xmpp clients is that you cannot run them in the background. Instead you must either have a provider that does push notifications or the client has to run constantly, draining the battery and closing automatically every now and then. At least that was the fatal result when I tried to convince friends to use xmpp a while ago.

I personally don't use iOS so I'm not sure whether that is still an issue. They released an update for the iOS client fairly recently so you could give that a shot? The new iOS client seems like it is very nice: https://chatsecure.org.

If I recall correctly the issue with ios xmpp clients is that you cannot run them in the background.

Why isn't this a problem for Android or Windows phone?

iOS has limited support for background processes.

My experience with Chatsecure (at least the version I got from F-Droid) was that it was too buggy to be worth it. Specifically, it would initiate OTR conversations with people without me asking. I think it even did so when I explicitly told it not use OTR at all, though it's been a while. If they fix that I might use it again. Do you have this problem, and/or have they fixed it to your knowledge?

I think the version in f-droid is 13.1.2. If you enable the guardian repository in f-droid that should have the 14.0.9 client which is considerably nicer. You can disable all otr if you want, or set it so you need to explicitly enable it when you are chatting with someone. The latest version has adopted the Android L theme as well so it is very well integrated. (I did have the same issue as you with the version in the f-droid repository).

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