Riot.im is one of the various client apps for Matrix, supporting iOS & Android, and is probably the most advanced at this point.

EDIT: clarify org structure: Matrix.org is being set up as a non-profit UK company owned by the various individuals running it. The business model is to create a new ecosystem for interoperable comms that everyone can benefit from.

Riot is a for-profit company (technically called Vector Creations Ltd) which is a subsiduary of Amdocs (a big telco supplier company). The business model is to offer paid hosted services in future for users wanting commercial-grade hosting and hosting private bots/bridges/etc.

(Also, in practice Riot is half UK and half French - although France has its own fair share of crypto confusion).

Matrix is a protocol for decentralized communication. Plenty more info can be gained from their FAQ: http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html The gist: the protocol can theoretically be used for decentralized chat, WebRTC, and comms between internet of things...With decentralized chat so far appearing to be the most popular. As to your question on the "Who is behind" this? See: http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#who-is-funding-matrix...

Riot (aka Riot chat, formerly known as Vector.im) is one of a number of client applications for interacting with Matrix servers. More clients can be found here: http://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html#clients

Also, the folks who created Riot/Vector, manage a public matrix homeserver that anyone can join. See https://riot.im Naturally, the point of this being a decentralized effort (and shying away from silos), you don't have to create an account on the riot.im homeserver, but in fact can setup/manage your own (matrix) homeserver! You know...like email used to be more decentralized ;-)

Cheers!

We end up talking on Riot instead of hangouts roughly 1x / month, and I've had no troubles with it so far (except that the matrix server seems to want to use way more memory than I think it "should", so I have it running in a loop that restarts the server whenever the OOM killer kills it. It gets killed fairly regularly (>1x / hour) and I don't really notice it while using Riot).

edit: I don't use the e2e encryption stuff. I have an SSL cert and if chat messages are encrypted as far as the server (which I control), that's fine with me.

I launch my instance like this: SYNAPSE_CACHE_FACTOR=0.01 synctl restart /etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml

I run synapse on a machine with 1.5GB of total RAM and have had zero memory issues since limiting the memory usage with the above command.

    while : ; do SYNAPSE_CACHE_FACTOR=0.01 python -B -m synapse.app.homeserver -c homeserver.yaml  ; sleep 20 ; done

Even at a "cache factor" of 0.01, my tiny DO droplet is still swapping and eventually the homeserver gets OOM killed.