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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Matrix is a really exciting project. It's really great that an open and decentralize alternative has a viable shot to mainstream adoption for this generation of communication platforms -- something that never materialized in Facebook's rise to dominance.

One thing about this roadmap post that is confusing to me is that the mobile client work, specifically iOS, seems under-prioritized. I'm assuming the focus on UX the last half of the year has been intended to put matrix in a position to compete with the mainstream apps for adoption, so having solid mobile UX seems just as important. Is there a reason matrix expects users to be desktop-centric or that the mobile UX is already good enough to compete with Slack, Discord, etc?

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The main reason for mobile being underprioritised is that many of the mobile devs (who are based in Rennes in France) are doubletiming with helping the French government project and so are quite stretched for time.

Also, for better or worse, we have entirely separate codebases currently on Web, iOS and Android. The reason we do this is to ensure that other app developers can use the same proper native matrix SDK in their apps rather than be forced to use a device abstraction approach like React Native. However, it means that typically the web SDK leads the way (as it’s the easiest test bed for new features, and several of the core spec team work on Riot/Web, so new stuff happens there). However, we’re starting to see the balance shift: the new Android SDK and app is more advanced than the JS SDK, and we might even experiment with using Kotlin Native as a way to share that code to other platforms.

Eitherway: we’re aware that mobile needs more love and investment and we’re trying to fix it :)

> ensure that other app developers can use the same proper native matrix SDK in their apps rather than be forced to use a device abstraction approach like React Native

Thank you!

:) just hope it's worth the tripled effort of us having to build and maintain matrix-{react,js}-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk versus writing once and running everywhere... ;)

That makes sense, thanks for the additional info!

Unless Apple drags their feet with PWA implementation a native iOS app might not be needed?

chat clients are surprisingly heavy, and i suspect tha PWAs will never perform as well as a handcrafted native app. But we shall see!

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