Quicksy as a WhatsApp alternative?
Does anyone here have any experience with Quicksy?
Quicksy is a Conversations.im flavor (which is a Jabber client for Android) that uses simplified phone number based registration and automatic contact discovery.
It seems like a good app for an easy introduction of non-technical users to Jabber.
I haven't tried Quicksy myself, but I've been using Conversations for a long time and I'm quite happy with it.
I'm considering how viable Quicksy is as a Whatsapp alternative. Do you think it can be recommended for non-tech users?
I remember the times when Jabber was barely usable, but the introduction of MAM (history synchronization), Stream Management (proper connection management on flaky connections), HTTP File Upload (sending files instead of clunky p2p transferring) (among other things) really did wonders to usability.
Layman pros:
- Available on Google Play, F-Droid.
- Simple SMS-based registration.
- Automatic phone number based contact discovery.
- All the essential IM features: text chat, audio/video calls, files/photos transfer, voice messages, synchronizable message history.
- IMO simple UI.
- Low impact on battery.
Also some more advanced pros:
- Federation: Quicksy provides a quicksy.im Jabber account which is interoperable with other Jabber servers.
- Doesn't lock users in (partially): moving to another Jabber server is still an inconvenience, but at least it's very much possible (unlike WhatsApp for example).
- End-to-end OMEMO encryption out of the box.
Cons:
- No iOS app. There probably are good Jabber clients, but I haven't looked into phone number based contact discovery options.
- I don't know what are the chances of quicksy.im server being eventually shut down. But then again, users are not locked-in.
- Conversations/Quicksy app is not perfect (I'm not aware of anything serious though). There are Conversations forks, but it's not applicable to Quicksy in this discussion.
- There's hardly any people in Jabber. But that's the current state, not an inherent deficiency.
Things I don't know about:
- I haven't used Conversations for group chats, not sure how good Quicksy is with these.
- Does Quicksy support using the same account on multiple devices? I assume it does, since Conversations does, I don't see any technical reason for Quicksy not to.
Existing Jabber users can enter their phone numbers and Jabber IDs into the Quicksy Directory to be discoverable by Quicksy users. Requires a small fee though.
There are of course non-Jabber alternatives like the relatively-popular Signal and Element.
I'm wary of recommending Signal for several reasons (like phone number being a requirement, lock-in in their centralized server without federation, the lack of multi-device support (or am I wrong about it?) and a bunch of other reasons). Still not an awful alternative.
I haven't used Element much (especially after the major app update and rebranding from Riot.im), so I'm not sure about it. Can someone tell how easy it is for non-tech people to register and set up the client for the first time? How easy it is to use in general? What's the impact on battery? I also have an issue with it being hard to self-host (hardware requirements).
I don't consider peer-to-peer messengers because they are inherently more complicated and a battery drain (and lack offline delivery, and sometimes the choice of clients, and ...). They are ok if your use case requires for it to be serverless, but this is not the case for general population.
There are also Kontalk and Snikket which seem to have similar to Quicksy premise. I don't know anything about them. Are they compatible with generic Jabber clients (Conversations, Gajim, etc.)? Are they going to remain compatible in the future? Do they support the discovery of external Jabber IDs based of phone numbers?
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