Monal - XMPP Chat 4+

I have some questions

I'm having problems with flashing and crashing, after sending a message at one point, monal flashed and when I opened it again nothing was displayed and it also flashed immediately. After repeating it many times I had to delete and reinstall it, now it is working fine, but I would like to know why it crashes.
Overall monal is still a good XMPP client for iOS, although it still has some minor issues

Developer Response ,

Well, I can't tell you what happened in the retrospective, but if you ever experience problems again, you can always create a ticket on github: https://github.com/monal-im/Monal/issues or write an email to info@monal-im.org

Great utility! Lots of development activity; high hopes!

It seems to me Monal has come a long way since release. Some devs just release their app and never work on it again - but not Monal! The Monal devs are reasonably active with maintenance & bugfixes. They’ve put together a very useful, feature-rich, easy-to-use XMPP client while keeping a minimalist feel.

Monal crashes occasionally, but not so much as to impede my usecase. I just close/reopen the app, or ignore the crash warning, and pick up where I left off. (To devs: I’ll have to remember to send you the crash report next time. I think I tried once and it said my phone wasn’t set up to send emails? I dunno. I’ll try.)

Overall, the app works great and has all the necessities. Works flawlessly with my cheap low-end VPS running ejabberd. Calls connect fast, voice is clear, no lag. OMEMO works; but I did have some issues with it early on where my recipient couldn’t read msgs (or vice versa) even though we had confirmed each other’s keys. To be fair this could have also been a user error. This was eventually resolved.

I would like to see additional privacy options. OMEMO is fine. I would like to see PGP implemented (for example, I believe the Linux XMPP client “Dino” has the ability to use PGP as well as OMEMO)

Perhaps even encrypted voice calls (assuming they are not already encrypted)

Developer Response ,

Thanks! Regarding GPG: That's on our roadmap, but currently we have a lot of other TODOs that are even more important, for example: https://monal-im.org/post/00013-nlnet-funding2/

Voice and video calls are already encrypted and signed with OMEMO (in OMEMO encrypted chats and if the other client supports this. At least Conversations for Android does support OMEMO signed calls).

XMPP on iOS is great

I had a mistaken view that there were no good XMPP options on iOS. Perhaps that was true before, but now it’s false. Additionally, the XMPP standards have added a lot of things to make the protocol very usable on mobile devices.

Monal is good, usable, and actively developed. There are some minor UI issues but they are fixable, and a small trade off for a communications channel you actually have control over. This is one app I’ll be pushing my friends to use.

Monal is open source which means you can have confidence that it can continue being updated for many years. I would consider this a significant strength for any software, but even more so on iOS which breaks apps once they are too old (guessing half of the iOS apps I’ve paid for don’t work/can’t be install anymore?)