Siskin IM 4+

This is currently the only actually useable XMPP OMEMO client on iOS. The only real competitor to this app on iOS would be ChatSecure. I prefer ChatSecure’s UI, but chat secure crashes too much to be usable. Siskin gets points for actually being stable and usable, which is apparently too high of a bar for most of the others to reach. Siskin at least actually works.

In some sense this application deserves five stars… it is sooooo close to being perfect for my use case. It works pretty well, it looks nice enough, it’s stable, and it even supports OMEMO very well. Check, check, check!

What I currently don’t like about Siskin is the situation with push notifications. I think it’d be perfectly fine for an unencrypted chat, but it’s not very friendly with OMEMO. Because the messages are encrypted, the content of the message is not shown in the push notification… I understand why this is, but it makes the app just so much worse to use. I believe there’s a XEP for handling encrypted push notifications that could solve this issue, but as far as I know it’s just a draft and unimplemented. I can’t really demand much as it’s a free app and all, but I will say this is the last thing I really want before I’m comfortable just saying the xmpp experience on iOS is solid. I really hope Tigase can make it happen — it would be awesome.

The other nitpick I have is somewhat related to push notifications. When the app is in the background and you receive a bunch of (possibly blank notifications) when you launch the app to check your messages / reply it can take a while for it to log in and pull all of the messages from the server. Just a few seconds, but it’s a bit inconvenient at times. I’m not sure if there’s an easy fix for that, though. Maybe something can be hacked together with the push notifications, or maybe this fetch can somehow look a little smoother in the UI… I’m not too sure. This is small potatoes compared to the other issue, though.

Thanks for the great app. I really hope it just gets that last little bit of polish that will make it perfect for me so I can feel comfortable switching not just myself but also friends over to XMPP in the future.

Other xmpp apps work just fine siskin has my account stuck in it and i cant remove it because it says i have the push notifications on but in order to turn them off i need to connect to my jid please help other then that i loved using the app until now tried everything to get it to work deleted app reinstalled and still has my account saved in the app