Psst… don’t tell anyone, but: Android development on Element X has now caught up with iOS and we’ve released an early edition of Element X in the Google Play Store.
Since we published our first release of Element X for iOS on the App Store in July, we’ve been swamped with Android users asking how to get involved too; and so now we’re officially making Element X goodness available on both platforms.
As a reminder, Element X is the fastest Matrix client ever - up to 6000x faster than any other Matrix client; and aims to be not just the best Matrix client, but the best messaging app in the world; better than Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage and other mainstream messaging apps.
In particular, Element X provides instant launch, instant sync and instant login (once your account is warmed up). It also has a far cleaner - more intuitive - interface, making it quicker and delightful to use. Under the hood, we’ve rewritten the engine of the app in Rust, giving spectacular performance and sharing reliability between both iOS & Android.
Now, today’s release isn’t finished yet; it focuses on messaging rather than collaboration use cases (so no filters, threads or spaces), encryption UI isn’t finished, and account registration and management isn’t hooked up yet. However, it’s still very usable as a daily driver for experienced users, and so this is intended as a preview to let more early adopters play with the app as soon as possible (and see how well it performs in the wild!). Meanwhile we’ll be following up with a much broader release once account management is in place in a few weeks.
To use Element X you need a homeserver with sliding sync support (e.g. matrix.org). Support in Element Cloud is coming shortly, and much much more - watch this space! Please let us know how you get on at #element-x-android, and please submit feedback from within the app if you hit any bugs.
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… and you can only get it on Google play. that makes sense. 🙄
It’s available on github too https://github.com/vector-im/element-x-android/releases/tag/v0.1.6
And will surely be on F-Droid when it’s ready, just as their previous apps have been.
The only build is an aab file. This is a Play Store bundle file, not an APK, so not directly installable in Android without the Google Play Store.
The only build being a Google Play release also indicates that non-foss libraries were likely included, such as the FCM libraries, as is common for GPlay releases of otherwise FOSS projects.
As far as I’m concerned, Element X for Android is not available yet, unless either building from source (with modifications to included libraries), or by using a non-FOSS version from GPlay.
Yup, it uses Firebase.
You can turn the AAB into an APK, though. It’s a bit weird that they don’t do this as part of their build process, but it’s not that hard and it’s not like this is the release version of the app.
I’m honestly quite surprised that nobody has taken bundletool and turned it into an app yet. I believe this app (which does much more than just install aabs) will let you load the AAB directly: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.apk.editor/
If you’re concerned about the lack of APK files, maybe consider opening a pull request to generate APKs out of the generated AABs in the Github pipeline. I’m sure it’d be appreciated.
Not just the “lack of APKs”, but the lack of a FOSS build. As you noted, it is possible to instal an AAB by extracting the APK(s) inside, but that doesn’t magically remove non-foss libraries.
You need Firebase for notification support on 99% of phones. It supports unifiedpush as well but you’ll have to build it yourself if you want to get rid of Firebase support entirely.
Is that a new third party client for x.com?
No, Element X is an upcoming reference client for the Matrix chat network. They have been appending X to the name of their experimental clients since long before Twitter rebranded.
This is a nice surprise. Didn’t even know this was in development. Can’t wait to test it out!
That sounds great, I think one of the biggest issues of Matrix is the feature packed default client, it can’t be easy with that much stuff in it and it isn’t ideal for most use cases because it tries to cover all. The official client is the one new users will try and in case of a chat app that should be a simple chat app like Whatsapp or signal, just without the extra crap!
Hm, maybe I’m missing something, but it doesn’t seem to me like Element has that much more stuff than Signal or Whatsapp 🤔
@jarfil
Stuff?Dunno, whatever @[email protected] meant. They all look similar to me.
Seriously? Maybe try to take another look because that couldn’t be father from reality!
It takes a lot of engineering and design to make complex customization easy with intuitive defaults. Kinda antithetical to the scrappy startup nature of matrix
Thanks to sliding sync this is very snappy compared to old element.
Element X is built on the rust SDK which should support multiple accounts. https://github.com/vector-im/element-meta/discussions/1832
I’m going to try it out now!
OOF
Seems like it’s hanging on the initial login.
Got it working.
Not sure how to view the spaces I’ve joined. I just see rooms.
The post says that threads and spaces aren’t added yet
Yup, didn’t read that part. It’s pretty unusable for me until I can organize the rooms to my preference.
Back to OG Element
The only view seems to be listing the room with the most recent message at the top.
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I used to use a version from github actions, this is just a gplay release
No SSO yet :(
