The major hurdle in this situation is that most XMPP clients are developed by FOSS volunteers or small underfunded developer groups. There is no VC monetization concept to be built on top of federated messaging, and there is no benevolent billionaire spending 50M USD for the development of awesome XMPP clients.
Matrix has created great clients for the major platforms with a dozen paid developers; Signal had a handful of developers as well. Conversations[0] on Android is a proof that a single dedicated developer can create a great and standards-compliant XMPP messenger.
Conversations has had frequent complaints about battery life issues, which to my knowledge have always been closed with some variation of "just ask about this on the chat" and/or "this is not something that can be fixed". In the past, I've noticed it doesn't work well for my battery life personally as well (so it's not just rumour).
For something that needs to run on a phone, battery life is one of the most important factors to make something actually useful. While the GUI looks great and I don't remember any usability warts, I don't think it's fair to recommend something with an issue this big.
Conversations is keeping its own TCP connection to the server. Battery usage depends on how many XMPP contacts you have, which modules your server has enables and whether you have the F-Droid or the Google Play version of the app. Come to the chat to find out what it is in your case ;-)
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The major hurdle in this situation is that most XMPP clients are developed by FOSS volunteers or small underfunded developer groups. There is no VC monetization concept to be built on top of federated messaging, and there is no benevolent billionaire spending 50M USD for the development of awesome XMPP clients.
Matrix has created great clients for the major platforms with a dozen paid developers; Signal had a handful of developers as well. Conversations[0] on Android is a proof that a single dedicated developer can create a great and standards-compliant XMPP messenger.
[0] https://conversations.im/
Conversations has had frequent complaints about battery life issues, which to my knowledge have always been closed with some variation of "just ask about this on the chat" and/or "this is not something that can be fixed". In the past, I've noticed it doesn't work well for my battery life personally as well (so it's not just rumour).
For something that needs to run on a phone, battery life is one of the most important factors to make something actually useful. While the GUI looks great and I don't remember any usability warts, I don't think it's fair to recommend something with an issue this big.
Conversations is keeping its own TCP connection to the server. Battery usage depends on how many XMPP contacts you have, which modules your server has enables and whether you have the F-Droid or the Google Play version of the app. Come to the chat to find out what it is in your case ;-)