I have no skin in this game but I'm honestly baffled.
A group of friends and I have been using Matrix for a couple of years now (web, Android, iOS, maybe some native clients (not sure here)) - and it's just been working. So maybe we're just using it somehow differently but we've all been quite happy with it.
The only oddities I'd noticed was when joining a massive channel, and people posting from the @matrix.org homeserver instead of their own or this small community one.
- Very slow for a chat client. Startup, input lag etc
- Continous popups to verify/authenticate. I was never able to complete this process to to some combo of bugs, or the difficulty level being beyond me.
- Synchronization bugs between desktop and mobile clients; messages would be missing for some people, or on some devices. Or the messages would show, but edits not reflected.
Yes ... my matrix.org account is still many times slower than my other chat apps and there's spam everywhere. It's not a great experience. I'm really hoping to see Matrix go big but it feels like there's still a long way to go.
That said, ElementX's video and audio calls work really well. If you added the ability to ring people's phones, so I don't have to first negotiate people into the chat using text messages or a phone call, I could see using it instead of FaceTime.
Pixel 9. Here's an example: GrapheneOS General is mirrored to Discord. Open both and start scrolling up. ElementX shows the spinner for 3 seconds at a time, Discord spins for 1/2 second or so. Go ahead and race them, it's not even close.
Another example: Matrix HQ is always notoriously slow. Just now I opened it and there are no messages ... none. No spinner. Just a note at the bottom saying "27 room changes." I waited for at least 10 seconds. Force quit the app, reload, and the messages are there.
What platform are you using that performs so much better than mine?
I suspect you are hitting perf issues on Android due to lack of caching (which bite Android way more than iOS due to JNA being way slower for calling the rust-sdk than Swift’s rust bindings). This should be fixed by https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-rust-sdk/issues/3280, which as you can see from all the checkboxes is making progress.
That might be it. Re-running the race on an iPad results in ElementX winning handily. What's funny is that Discord is scrolling smoothly and elegantly, while ElementX is stuttering and floundering and looking pretty bad graphically ... but ElementX definitely moves faster.
This is good news! Put ElementX on the desktop, make the UI less weird, fix the room key sharing bugs (I last saw "message couldn't be decrypted" last month), and Matrix could really become something.
A group of friends and I have been using Matrix for a couple of years now (web, Android, iOS, maybe some native clients (not sure here)) - and it's just been working. So maybe we're just using it somehow differently but we've all been quite happy with it.
The only oddities I'd noticed was when joining a massive channel, and people posting from the @matrix.org homeserver instead of their own or this small community one.