Conversations

Conversations is an XMPP chat client for Android. XMPP is an open messaging standard, so the app talks to any server that speaks it — a public one, or one you run yourself — rather than to a single company. Your address looks like an email address and identifies you across servers.

It supports end-to-end encryption through OMEMO, and also handles OpenPGP for people who already use it. Group conversations, image and file sharing, read markers and typing notifications work when the server supports the matching extensions, which is the usual trade-off with a federated protocol: the feature set depends partly on the server you pick.

The app aims to keep battery use low by relying on a single long-lived connection rather than frequent polling.