After months of hard work it’s at the time to release the first alpha version of Smack 4.1, the open source Java XMPP client library, for testing purposes.

Smack 4.1 marks a milestone in the development history of Smack, as it’s the first version that runs native on Android. This means that aSmack is no longer required and will be phased out in the future. Future aSmack releases will be solely form the stable 4.0 branch.

Together with support for Android, Smack 4.1 also adds support for XEP-198 “Stream Management” in smack-tcp. XMPP connections with enabled Stream Management provide acknowledgments of sent stanzas (and acknowledges received stanzas to the server) and allow transparent stream resumption in case of a network outage (for example because of a WiFi GSM switch on Android).

Smack 4.1.0-alpha1 is now available from Maven Central and we would welcome interested and adventurous users to try this early alpha release and provide feedback. For more information about using Smack 4.1 and how to include it in your Android project, consult the “Smack 4.1 Readme and Upgrade Guide”.