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by arendtio 2662 days ago
I doubt that the standards are the cause. I mean we have XMPP and companies use it to build products but if they prefer to disable the federated features (as WhatsApp did back in the day) you can't blame the standard.

The problem seems to be more along the lines of 'standards don't make money'. So the problem is that companies implement those standards and they do so after their purpose which is to create value for the shareholders.
1 comments
dmitriid 2662 days ago
> I mean we have XMPP and companies use it to build products but if they prefer

they prefer standards and protocols that work well in the smartphone era. As late as 2016 XMPP had next to zero support for features expected in a mobile-first world: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html. Most XEPs in the article were at experimental stage or draft at the time, and are still in the same status nearly three years later. Some of them like XEP 0352 are "Implementation of the protocol described herein is not recommended for production systems".

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arendtio 2662 days ago
As far as the standard process goes that is true and I honestly don't know why those XEPs are not recommended yet. From my perception as a user and server administrator, they work just great. Nevertheless, just because the standard process didn't finalize those extensions, the developers out there don't care and take the draft specifications anyway.

Therefore, suggesting that XMPP had zero smartphone support in 2016 isn't true when talking about the actual applications. I used XMPP back then (still do) and the only problem I remember from that time was the Push-Notification issue for iOS (was solved a year ago or so). With every other OS, you had no problems you (or your server admin) couldn't solve.

But my point was a different one: Companies actually use XMPP (despite being incomplete in the 'recommended' state) but they disable the parts which do not benefit their purpose (e.g. Federation).

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dmitriid 2661 days ago
Thing is: if there's still work on those standards, it's not apparent. Are the abandoned? Are they going to change? Especially when it comes to warnings like "Deferred after 12 months of inactivity in its previous Experimental state. Implementation of the protocol described herein is not recommended for production systems."

> Therefore, suggesting that XMPP had zero smartphone support in 2016 isn't true when talking about the actual applications.

There was (and still is) only one actual application: Conversations for Android. Support and implementation across the rest (servers and services, desktop applications, iOS) varies widely (or wildly? :) ).

> Companies actually use XMPP (despite being incomplete in the 'recommended' state) but they disable the parts which do not benefit their purpose

I know that quite a few start with XMPP (or its parts), but it looks like most abandon it when they move to mobile (for various reasons, including the ones I listed).

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