What's the value proposition of building a whole new client? If your goal is to give people a client for your cool new protocol, why would you waste any development resources on squashing fiddly UI bugs of your own doing, rather than, say, providing a reference implementation by forking the Signal app and swapping out the pieces until it's talking Matrix instead of TextSecure?

I see this mistake constantly. The ring.cx folks did the same thing. Inevitably, everyone ends up commenting how poor the app is—some of them even saying how much they'd like to be able to use it and would if it weren't for the UI. It wouldn't be so silly if there weren't plenty of essentially ready-made solutions for the problem.

1. Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron)

2. The hope is to piggyback on one of the existing native Matrix SDKs or clients rather than write a whole new one.

3. One of the biggest complaints we hear about Matrix is that there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet. So this is our chance to fix that.

> Signal doesn't have a native Linux app (other than Electron)

How is that an explanation for directing (apparently limited) resources into riot-android?

> there is no native desktop app with parity to Riot yet

Huh? The comparisons I made in my comment were to Signal and Ring, which are predominantly mobile messaging apps. The person you originally responded to was discussing Matrix on mobile. Why do you keep mentioning desktop? If there were any confusion, this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone.

Riot/Android doesn't run on Linux, so directing limited resources into it is fairly irrelevant. The point of this campaign is to fund us to work on a native app which can benefit desktop and handset users alike - whilst also supporting the core team so we can also work on the React, Android and iOS SDKs which power Riot. I keep mentioning desktop because this is a significant benefit of the campaign.

The idea of somehow ripping out the core of the Signal or Ring apps and trying to bolt their UI onto Matrix SDKs is an interesting one, but in practice both protocols have significant differences to Matrix, and at best this would be a pretty big impedance mismatch. Of course, someone in the community is welcome to try to do it. Meanwhile, we'll keep plugging away at trying to make Riot kick ass (via the underlying Matrix SDKs), and add a native app to the pantheon too :)

> this is a thread about an announcement for a new smartphone

The smartphone in question runs Debian.

I think the whole point is elsewhere - get the UI/UX right. People forgive many things, but bad UX is not among them.

That said, I am excited about this - I love idea about pure OSS phone with hardware kill switches for mic and camera!