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by upofadown 3464 days ago
After a recent discussion of the issues with XMPP on mobile, some obvious questions:

1. How well does Riot deal with changing network connections? Does it have problems when a mobile device switches between, say, WiFi and 4G? How well does it deal with a complete loss of connectivity?

2. How well does Riot deal with power management on mobile devices? Can it spend time in the background while getting message alerts while not running down the battery?
2 comments
heavenlyhash 3464 days ago
It's really good. I'll vouch for it as someone who has been using the mobile apps on both platforms, and the web application(s) on the desktop for over a year now. They're great. Battery isn't a problem; messages NEVER get lost.

I actually came to matrix after trying to write an XMPP client, believe it or not. The matrix protocol is WAY better equipped for the future than XMPP is: it simply has the core designs necessary to make it federate well and do message sync without losses. (XMPP doesn't. (Unless you count a half-dozen XEPs, none of which are reliably implemented in all clients. But we're getting increasingly parenthetical here; by comparison, matrix Just Works.))

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tacoman 3464 days ago
I've been using Vector/Riot using the Android version in F-Droid on Blackberry 10 for 6-9 months, connecting to my own server on my DSL. I haven't noticed a single issue with battery or lost messages.
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upofadown 3464 days ago
OK, I did a better search and found something relevant in the fricken Matrix FAQ:

* https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#i-installed-riot-via...

>I installed Riot via F-Droid, why is it draining my battery?

>The F-Droid release of Riot does not use Google Cloud Messaging. This allows users that do not have or want Google Services installed to use Riot.

>The drawback is that Riot has to pull for new messages, which can drain your battery. To counter this, you can change the delay between polls in the settings. Higher delay means better battery life (but may delay receiving messages). You can also disable the background sync entirely (which means that you won’t get any notifications at all).

>If you don’t mind using Google Services, you might be better off installing the Google Play store version.

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