Monal - XMPP Chat

An amazing app. Runs smoothly. Can be improved, but for its price is great.

Use jabber? Have iOS? Use monal p e r i o d. Recent iOS versions probably work extremely well. iOS: 16 does have a couple quirks, I think. Haven't zeroed it in. yet. Devs: I know I am using an ancient iOS version but my contacts and I have extreme trouble getting video calls to connect sometimes and they will drop randomly. It's likely a network issue, but we notice that if we use wired or no headsets, symptoms seem to subside and dissappear or, at very least, seem to help with initial connection speed and success rate. Not sure if we will ever upgrade from 16. not a big deal.

Wow Monal for iOS has come a long way. Years ago it wasn’t my first choice. Neither were there any viable alternatives to be honest. Monal 6.4.0 performs really well for me. Kudos! Obviously apple being apple I don’t get notifications if I didn’t touch the app for a while. This is something all third party apps have to contend with on iOS.

Why not adding OTR feature which already exists in Chat Secure app; This will make this app work more efficiently with other xmpp clients on other OS’s

This is in no way functionally comparable to Conversations on android but having tried ALL the recently updated xmpp text apps on iOS this is by far the best option Using the Conversations server as sender and recipient often there are huge delays for iOS clients on WiFi and Verizon 5G. Don’t give up on us.

I had a mistaken view that there were no good XMPP options on iOS. Perhaps that was true before, but now it’s false. Additionally, the XMPP standards have added a lot of things to make the protocol very usable on mobile devices. Monal is good, usable, and actively developed. There are some minor UI issues but they are fixable, and a small trade off for a communications channel you actually have control over. This is one app I’ll be pushing my friends to use. Monal is open source which means you can have confidence that it can continue being updated for many years. I would consider this a significant strength for any software, but even more so on iOS which breaks apps once they are too old (guessing half of the iOS apps I’ve paid for don’t work/can’t be install anymore?)

UPDATE: Thank you for your reply. I guess my feature request is for Monal to be allowed to accept self-signed certificates. (Host has non globally routable IP.) My XMPP host won’t let Monal connect because it’s using an obsolete encryption protocol. I see in prosody logs other clients connecting with TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 but when Monal tries to connect it’s rejected. Log message: “Client disconnected: sslv3 alert bad certificate.” This app looks great and I want to try it and recommend it, so hopefully this is just a minor bump in the road.

It no longer works. I’m running iOS 14.1 and I refuse to update. I want to give a better rating because Monal seems to have the most compatibility and functionality with my server but I can’t use the app anymore.... Please fix the app and I will fix my rating :/

This app automatically creates a file folder in the phone, this might leads to leakage of files shared in conversations when phones are compromised or inspected by government authorities

Have been using the beta version of the app. I give the app 5 stars, because its a solid app for iPhone. Very dependable. Messages deliver as expected! I do have one recommendation, This being a mobile app, network connectivity is expected to be unstable. It is not necessary to notify the client of sync issues as a notification. I hope the developer considers this annoyance and enables the user to disable this notification by default.