Snikket iOS app now publicly released

This is the announcement many people have been waiting for since the project began!

Opinions are often strong about which is the best mobile operating system. However, while it varies by region and demographic, wherever you are it’s very likely that you have Apple users in your life, even if you don’t use one yourself. We want to ensure that the platform you use (by choice or otherwise) is not a barrier to secure and decentralized communication with the important people in your life.

The lack of a suitable client for iOS was an obstacle to many groups adopting Snikket and XMPP. For this reason, today’s release of a Snikket app for Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices is a significant milestone for the project.

A community effort

It’s a journey that began late last year with the announcement that we would be sponsoring support for group chat encryption in Siskin IM, the open-source iOS XMPP client developed by Tigase.

The Tigase folk have been very supportive of our project, and I’d like to especially thank Andrzej for his assistance and patience with all my newbie iOS development questions!

There are many other folk who have also helped unlock this achievement. This includes everyone who helped to fund the development work - especially Waqas Hussain, the kind folk at jmp.chat and of course absolutely everyone who has donated to the project. The majority of donations are anonymous so it’s impossible to thank everyone individually, but the amount of support we’ve received as a project is amazing, and really gives us confidence in achieving even more ambitious milestones in the future.

Funding aside, we couldn’t have refined the app without help from our diligent beta testers - with particular thanks to Michael DiStefano, Martin Dosch, mimi8999 and Nils Thiele for their bug-catching and comprehensive feedback. Everyone participating in the beta programme has helped shape the app we’re releasing today.

What happens now?

We’ll be rolling out a Snikket server update shortly that will add a link to the iOS app from Snikket invitation pages.

If you’re eager to make the app available to your users before then, you can add the following line to your snikket.conf:

SNIKKET_WEB_APPLE_STORE_URL=https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snikket/id1545164189

After saving the file, apply the change with the command docker-compose up -d.

If you are using the Snikket hosting service, you will get an email soon that explains how to enable the app store link for your instances.

We’re not done yet

This is a big milestone, without a doubt. But we’re not completely done. The app is not perfect (yet!) and we’re still working on many things. But we believe this is no reason not to share it with the world as early as we can.

Push notification compatibility

The first thing to note (especially as many non-Snikket users will also be excited about a new iOS XMPP client on the scene) is that our primary focus has been on the app working seamlessly with Snikket servers. We’re committed to XMPP interoperability, but time and resources mean we can’t develop and test every change in pace with every XMPP server.

Although we expect it to generally work, there are some known compatibility issues currently. Specifically, due to the strict “no background network connections” policy for iOS apps, we have needed to adapt push notification handling slightly differently to what is supported on most XMPP servers today. The extensions we use are openly published by Tigase, and we have made available community modules for Prosody (mod_cloud_notify_encrypted, mod_cloud_notify_priority_tag and mod_cloud_notify_filters), and discussion has begun on moving these extensions over to the XMPP Standards Foundation standards process. We welcome help and contributions towards evolving XMPP’s current push notification support. If you’re interested, reach out!

Until then, although some backwards-compatibility considerations are in the app, this means it’s very possible you may experience issues with notifications on some non-Snikket servers when the app is closed (though Tigase servers and Prosody servers with the community modules enabled should be fine).

Language support

The app is currently only available in English, which is an unfortunate contrast from all other Snikket projects which are available in many languages already.

Updating the app to support translation of the interface is high on our priority list. After this is implemented, we will also be looking for help from translators, so stay tuned for further announcements.

Other work in progress

Other known issues that we are working on:

• Notifications for OMEMO-encrypted messages show a potentially-confusing message about the app lacking OMEMO support. This will be fixed by the same server update that adds the app to the Snikket invitation page.
• Group chat notifications are not yet working. This will also be rolled out as a future server update.

Of course, we will also soon be incorporating feedback from the usability audit and testing sessions when that work is completed.

I want to say a final thanks to our entire community for supporting the project. Snikket has ambitious goals, and the progress we’re making couldn’t be achieved without all the help and support we’ve received.

Drop us feedback about the app if you try it out, file bug reports and feature requests to help us with planning and, if you can, donate to help sustain the development of the entire project.

We look forward to welcoming more users to the XMPP network than ever before!