> The official client is plagued with UX bugs. Push notifications works some of the time, sometimes the app would hang trying to open or access a channel, some message get stuck as the last entry with no means to delete them. It makes the network barely usable since clients can't keep up with whatever is going on at the network level.

Speaking as the project lead, one of the controversial decisions we made with Matrix was to try to seed the ecosystem with effectively three entirely independent clients. Element Web, iOS and Android share zero code (other than the low-level E2EE library). The reason we did this was to dogfood the protocol, avoid a client monoculture, ensure that multiple independent clients would work well together, and also provide native SDKs for the three main platforms that others could build on or fork.

This strategy worked to some extent... but the major downside has been that it's more than tripled the dev efforts on the clients (relative to doing PWAs or React Native or Flutter or whatever), and each client has ended up with a completely different set of problems and bugs. For instance, the things you've complained about above all sound specific to Element Android (other than slow room joins, which is a serverside issue that we're working on right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7tGU6vv6ZQ). It's rather sad to dismiss Matrix (or even Element) as a whole due to bugs on one specific app on one specific platform.

We've also ended up being massively distracted by building out the non-optional fundamental work such as E2EE and the core decentralisation bits of Matrix (as well as stuff like low bandwidth, which has been driven by paying customers who care less about UX and more about capabilities). This has in turn ended up undermanning the core app teams fairly catastrophically. Until this week there was effectively only one guy paid to work fulltime specifically on the core app for Element Android - and it's only been in the last few months that we've been able to put more than one person on Element iOS and Element Web. Everything else has been stuff which has indirectly landed via customer projects for people like the French govt or German Bundeswehr, or FOSS contributions.

So, the good news is that this is being fixed (better late than never) - there are ~5 people working on improving core UX in Element Web right now, ~3 on iOS and 2 on Android. The improvements on iOS & Web over the last few months should be really quite palpable - e.g. all the stuff on https://element.io/blog/introducing-voice-messages-and-so-mu.... Android should be starting to catch up quick too.

Meanwhile, if anyone likes Matrix and wants to help us improve the clients, we're frantically trying to bring on more people to work on it fulltime to fix this faster - see https://element.io/careers for details.