No Xabber on Google Play?

[bowmanonjupiter2]

Hi,

I can not find Xabber on Google Play?

[hueldoeu]

you should ask the developer for the beta version

[tcreek]

Seems to be abandoned project. Even on F-Droid, no update in over 4 years.

[hueldoeu]

i had lots of contact with the developer. a really cool guy. xabber is definitely not abandoned.

[tcreek]

There has been no activity on F-Droid over 4 years. Removed from Google store, and nothing going on here in 5 years.

[hueldoeu]

he told me once since android v10 it's very difficult to write apps with special permissions for android 10 and above. it's like google reached their goals for a google-only android-smartphone, like apple does to iphone.

[tcreek]

Yes, special permissions is an issue, but other projects figured out some workarounds.

[hueldoeu]

would you be so kind and contact him?

[andrewnenakhov]

Hi. The project is definitely not dead, it's that the Android version is currently on pause, while we're actively building iOS and Web versions of Xabber, as well as Xabber server, which is necessary to make it possible XMPP to work well on those platforms. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to hire additional developer to work on Android version in addition to all other expenses (if you have such resources, pls contact me). We deprioritized android also because it is the easiest platform to work on, and challenges on iOS and Web are far more difficult to overcome than on Android, so plan is to finish with iOS, then use the experience and protocols developed for iOS and port them to Android.

Old Xabber for Android was abandoned due to a set of unfortunate circumstances: it had major architecture flaws that we couldn't really fix, and it was prone to have really bad performance issues on high-load accounts. In addition, it had a rather poor build system, so even building it was a problem. So when Google started pestering us with their very vague demands to update privacy policies which we don't completely understand what they want (given the decentralized nature of the app I'm still not sure what checkbox to put when it comes to question regarding content available in the app), etc, so we just decided that we could live without Google Play for the moment. And considering our current country of residence, the lack of exposure is maybe a good thing too.

But the good news is that we're almost done with iOS and Web, in iOS the only thing we still need to do is to finish implementing our new identity verification protocol (this is so good it's nuts!), and do some markup fixing in chat screen and maybe rework the contacts screen design and then release the app. After that, we plan to switch to the development of a new Android version with full force.

[andrewnenakhov]

The latest build of old Xabber is available here: https://www.xabber.com/rel/client/android/last/xabber.apk