There might have been political reasons why google dropped XMPP, but it would also make sense as a purely technical decision.
This is plain untrue. Yes it was invented a long time ago, but thanks to the extensibility it has evolved over time just as the way people use it has changed. This evolution is a healthy and necessary part of an open ecosystem.
I know it frustrates people that modern features don't work in stagnated clients such as Pidgin and Adium, but modern clients support all the things you would expect.
Servers and mobile clients have supported mobile-friendly traffic and connection optimisations for many many years now.
> There might have been political reasons why google dropped XMPP, but it would also make sense as a purely technical decision.
Google contributed extensions to XMPP, the same way they contribute to other internet standards. I think they were quite comfortable with this. The XMPP-based Google Talk was their longest-running messaging solution after all...
What makes you think so? If Conversations was draining my battery, I would have noticed by now, I'm pretty sure that Facebook Messenger is worse in this aspect...
Has this been fixed in XMPP?
That's true for email also. So that's not an evidence for anything lacking in xmpp. The plain fact is that Google killed it due to their greed.
Scrolling back is atrociously slow, and it doesn't even seem to have a search feature !
I'd take XMPP alternatives like Conversations, Jitsi, Pidgin any day ! (And Element of course.)
The only thing "killed" XMPP was that proprietary made money, XMPP didn't.
Apart from that, it's alive and well. See Conversations for android, Prosody for server.