I am on the standard Riot client, I didn't realize that RiotX existed. Will definitely give that a try, thanks for the heads up!

Note that the polish concerns I have aren't just for Android though -- some of my contacts are only on desktop, and Riot's desktop app also has issues with contrast, resource usage, notifications/updates, searching in encrypted rooms, key synchronization. Even on the backend, setting up closed communities is just really confusing and buggy. I had to abandon a community and recreate it half way through because it bugged out trying to remove an empty E2E room and then couldn't add/remove/edit any rooms after that point -- and this was on the main, public Matrix homeserver.

It's getting better. A year ago, I don't think I could have used Matrix/Riot to the extent I'm using it now. I don't want to be too critical, because it's improving at a genuinely impressive rate. I'm still betting on Matrix being the future-proof choice for me to make for the majority of my chat/community infrastructure.

It just feels like it's still early in development, clients like RiotX are still in beta -- which makes it tricky when I'm trying to roll it out in "production" to very young and very nontechnical users.

We stopped developing Riot/Android months ago - meanwhile RiotX/Android is about to exit beta and is feeling unrecognisably better.

On E2E, search is now implemented, as is totally revamped verification and cross signing and fixed key sync, as per https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/matrix/

Communities are a trainwreck but next up to get fixed in the coming months.

Thanks for sticking with it; we’re catching up as fast as we can...

Having just struggled through verifying keys on multiple devices, that video makes me really happy, for a lot of reasons. Particularly, it's a nice bonus-surprise to see the E2E search and Pantaliamon as generic tools that 3rd-party clients can hook into, because there are a few communities where I'm thinking about putting together very narrowly-focused custom clients.

And I just installed RiotX and it shows reactions correctly!

Hopefully comments like this aren't too exhausting. There's two sides of it, one of which is all the stuff to complain about. But the other side is that stuff like Pantaliamon is really cool -- it means if I want to build a custom chat client with weird features, I can have decent encryption for free without having to worry that I'm doing something horribly insecure. The bridges are still getting polished, but similarly, they're also amazing because bridges allow me to make very forward-facing, future-proof decisions about where I want to host communities and I know that I won't have to abandon existing members that are on platforms like Discord.

The core project is just really exciting, it addresses all of these problems that I've had in the back of my head for a long time. There's this wonderful feeling where you're constantly annoyed about something and feel like there's nothing you can do about it, and then one day you find out that not only does someone else feel the same way, but they're actually fixing it. And even more than that, just finding out that it is actually possible for those problems to be fixed; that there's going to be a point in my future where that happens.

So there's admittedly a lot of impatience there, but it's coming from a very hopeful place, and I hope it isn't discouraging.

Do you know what the deal is with the constantly present "Listening for events" notification with RiotX?

Is this to work around the Android background task auto-killing?

IIRC, apps that stay alive in the background have to use that persistent notification. It doesn't happen if you can rely on push notifications, though. I do not use google services (f-droid version), so I was expecting to see that, but do you see it as well if using them?

Note that you can hide the notification by long-pressing it.