Monal — XMPP Chat

Monal has consistently been updated throughout the years, and is currently the best client on iOS. I had been using Siskin for a while, and it was decent enough, but the lack of proper push notifications was incredibly frustrating. Monal has proper push notifications even with omemo, which is great. I was initially concerned with battery usage, and while settings reports high usage, in practice it has been a non-issue (monal has documentation discussing why this is a measurement error on iOS’s part). Overall I’m pretty pleased right now. There’s still features I’d like to see, and the UI feels a bit buggy sometimes (e.g., uploading images never seems to work the first time…), but this is actually usable right now, even with omemo. I hope it continues to improve!

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)

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