Not running in the browser is a major downside. I've used Jitsi this past week with technologically illiterate family members, and being able to just have them enter a URL while talking on the phone is really great.

Also, being able to just use any OS with a modern browser you please.

Personally I don’t want to have my web browser run applications, I’d rather have native MacOS or Linux apps, but I do see how having at least a version of it available in a browse is handy for potability.

Don't get me wrong: I want both to be possible, but being able to just get up and go is really helpful.

For a tool like this though I'm not sure what a native app would add. Most of what it does builds on the functionality of a modern web browser.

Modern Web browser don't allow true peer-to-peer, you always need a server.

Jami uses a fully distributed network (DHT) to initiate connections.

Webtorrent is a thing though. Is it not true peer-to-peer?

webtorrent builds on webrtc, which requires stun and ice servers. so you still send metadata to defined servers for connection handeling and most sadly you can't p2p in an offline LAN.

> so you still send metadata to defined servers for connection handeling

This is also true for typical p2p protocols though, isn't it? Normal torrent clients for example have hardcoded servers to start their dht search from.

Not necessarily. It does follow that if you submit to a tracker, but there's the DHT option which is advertised locally [0]. The way it seems to do it is the magnet uri includes the contents of a few IPs that might have, at minimum, a more up-to-date DHT with more IPs. At best it also includes some chunks of whatever you're trying to download.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1332107/how-does-dht-in-...

https://superuser.com/questions/592238/ does not seem to agree with that statement.

Something interesting is that Jami seems to be the only video conferencing app available on Android TV, very useful.

> doesn’t support calls from the browser

This is a feature, not a bug.

Still not an "alternative" for some people when browser-based might be the main feature. It's complicated.