Snikket Android app temporarily unavailable in Google Play store | Hacker News Reader

Snikket Android app temporarily unavailable in Google Play store

snikket.org

21 pointszaik8 comments

One thing I don't really understand; if it's basically a fork of Conversations and they follow their changes, why does it exist?

I like conversations a lot especially because it supports openkeychain integration so I can use my openpgp smartcards with it. I'd never even heard of Snikket.

Good question! There are a few reasons. One is that we want to provide consistency across platforms. There is no "Conversations for iOS" but there is a Snikket for iOS, and we are working on more platforms. There are many XMPP clients around, but the goal is that when you install a Snikket app, you know what you are getting - and that it will be fully compatible with the Snikket server and the Snikket apps for other platforms.

The other reason is that it's not 100% a clone of Conversations, we have additional patches, but we contribute upstream whatever makes sense (e.g. we sponsored the invitation support that went into Conversations upstream). But the Snikket apps don't allow registration on public servers, because Snikket servers are designed to be private servers (whether that's self-hosted or hosted by us). Conversations (and most XMPP clients) allow registration on any public server. That's not the experience we're after.

You can read more about the project goals at https://snikket.org/about/goals/

Aha I see, thanks! Cool, I don't use iOS so I wasn't aware of this. I always install Conversations through F-Droid too (I don't use the play store even).

But I like your goals, what bothers me about XMPP is that pretty much every mod con is in an extension. Understandable considering this is the core idea of the protocol but it makes it a bit of a hit and miss to understand what works with what (a bit similar to IRCv3).

In the end I ended up using Matrix a lot more though I still use Conversations sometimes. But I understand the idea of making a branded platform out of XMPP with a known-good base level of supported features.

I think Snikket has extra integration with their self-hosted server, making it more of a Slack/Teams competitor than a generic XMPP client.

Definitely not a Slack/Teams competitor, Snikket is explicitly focused on personal chat and small groups and not on team or large community chat.

Kafkaesque. The whole point of choosing snikket is to avoid data hoarding by the tech giants. And their app gets removed because they're wrongly accused of doing what google has been doing for 2 decades, siphoning personal data.

That's the whole point of the store reviews, it's a PR game of shifting blame.

Rest assured that none of their apps follows this process.

Properly Evil.

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