User report from 2025: Both the application and web UI are still buggy and slow. This is not acceptable in an application this simple in nature, that has been around for so long.
Aside from the other comments, I would say that a modern chat application is anything but 'simple' - there are a vast amount of features that you expect, from pinned messages to file downloads to threads, to say nothing of end to end encryption.
The only desktop messenger with smooth performance I'v used was Telegram. Signal, WhatsApp, Element, and all the other Electron applications all introduce hard-to-pinpoint latency somewhere. Unfortunately, Telegram is... Telegram.
For XMPP/Matrix/etc. there are plenty of (more) native alternatives but they're not as feature complete as Telegram or their Electron counterparts, unfortunately.
My lack of C++ and Qt experience has still managed to keep my urge to rip out the Telegram protocol and replace it with something else. Maybe I'll try throwing AI at the problem and release a slop POC. Secretly, I'm hoping someone else will do the hard work for me...
The mobile apps for all are fine, though. Electron hasn't hit mobile phones just yet.
I use thunderbird for email and they now let you connect to matrix, irc, xmpp, and whatever Odnoklassniki is. It's quite barebones however, like it looks like people are just adding lines to a google doc, barely any interface at all. Really a stylesheet would go along way, looks like userChrome.css works, so maybe I'll mess with that.
I tried Thunderbird for Matrix but I found it too spartan to be usable as my day-to-day messenger, unfortunately. I think most people are less demanding of their applications than I am, because Element, NeoChat, and Fluffychat are quite popular.
which app are you talking about? as per the conference keynote, there are loads of different ones now, written in different stacks without any overlapping implementations.
If you're talking about the old Element Classic mobile app, then yes, it's now been replaced by Element X (which now has spaces & threads support, and so pretty much has parity with the old app), and it is super fast, and not buggy.
Latest Element X Testflight and nightly both crash for me very consistently when navigating back from two or more levels deep (like from Chats > room > room info and then going back). iOS 26.1 beta (23B5064e). I’ve been blaming it on iOS for now since I can’t go back to not running a beta yet :( Also seems like the notification badge is always = real notifications + 1 which i’ve read happens with Synapse or something but I’ve never found a way to fix it.
Also seems like spoiler messages in Element X appear as just an empty chat bubble that i’ve been meaning to report. And why does sending spoilers on Element require using /spoiler when discord and telegram use `||spoilered text||`?
I really want to love Matrix. I’ve been using it with my girlfriend (on a self hosted Synapse server for us) who barely tolerates it, some other friends who range from also tolerating it to hating it (and having decryption errors a lot with a friend who has several clients they switch between, mostly whenever I send a message from another client like when going from element to nheko). I bridge Telegram, Signal, and IRC to matrix (and probably will add more soon). I’m not sure why I care so much about this chat protocol, but I do for some reason and I really want to see it work.
Unfortunately that really does sound like an iOS beta problem - iOS betas are infamously unstable, and effectively used by Apple to hunt crashes that they've introduced when existing apps run.
Hoping there’s a new iOS version soon then so I can get off the beta, has been annoying dealing with crashes but at least element x launches really fast.
Really glad to hear that notification badges are almost fixed! I left an upvote on the spoilers issue but don’t really have anything to add other than it’s annoying to not have a way of even seeing the contents.
Right, thanks for clarifying. Yes, the desktop app isn’t as fast as it should be. On mobile we fixed this with Element X; on desktop we’re in the middle of the transition still. The conf talk on Element X Web is pretty good at explaining where it’s at: https://youtu.be/z0ULOptq2vk?t=240
Edit: also, on macOS on Apple Silicon, you can use Element X on macOS as a desktop app, and it works impressively well.
again, which app are you talking about? it's like saying "the web is buggy" but not saying what browser you're using. Looking at the App Store reviews for Element X at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/element-x-secure-chat-call/id1..., there are no complaints about bugs at all (only missing functionality, which has since been added)?
