Do you want to use Conversations in your company and require assistance in setting up a suitable XMPP server or are you having problems getting started with Conversations?

If you have a general question about Conversations that has not been answered by our FAQ, you can join the Conversations group chat on: conversations@conference.siacs.eu

This is a short excerpt of the entire, much more detailed FAQ that can be found in the README.md at our GitHub repository.

How do I install Conversations?

Conversations is entirely open source and licensed under GPLv3. So if you are a software developer, you can check out the sources from GitHub and use gradle to build your APK file.

The more convenient way — which not only gives you automatic updates but also supports the further development of Conversations — is to buy the App in the Google Play Store.

Buying the App from the Play Store will also give you access to our beta test.

How do I create an account?

XMPP, like email, is a federated protocol, which means that there is not one company you can create an official XMPP account with. Instead there are hundreds, or even thousands, of providers out there. One of those providers is our very own conversations.im. If you don’t like to use conversations.im use a web search engine of your choice to find another provider. Or maybe your university has one. Or you can run your own. Or ask a friend to run one. Once you've found one, you can use Conversations to create an account. Just select register new account on server within the create account dialog.

Domain hosting

Using your own domain not only gives you a more recognizable Jabber ID, it also gives you the flexibility to migrate your account between different XMPP providers. This is a good compromise between the responsibilities of having to operate your own server and the downsides of being dependent on a single provider.

Learn more about conversations.im Jabber/XMPP domain hosting.

Running your own

If you already have a server somewhere and are willing and able to put the necessary work in, one alternative-in the spirit of federation-is to run your own. We recommend either Prosody or ejabberd. Both of which have their own strengths. Ejabberd is slightly more mature nowadays but Prosody is arguably easier to set up.

For Prosody you need a couple of so called community modules most of which are maintained by the same people that develop Prosody.

If you pick ejabberd make sure you use the latest version. Linux Distributions might bundle some very old versions of it.

How can I set up a custom hostname and port?

Conversations will automatically look up the SRV records for your domain name, which can point to any hostname port combination. If your server doesn’t provide those, please contact your admin and have them read this document on the prosody wiki. If your server operator is unwilling to fix this you can enable advanced server settings in the expert settings of Conversations.

How does the address book integration work?

The address book integration was designed to protect your privacy. Conversations neither uploads contacts from your address book to your server nor fills your address book with unnecessary contacts from your online roster. If you manually add a Jabber ID to your phones address book, Conversations will use the name and the profile picture of this contact. To make the process of adding Jabber IDs to your address book easier, you can click on the profile picture in the contact details within Conversations. This will start an add to address book intent with the JID as the payload. This doesn’t require Conversations to have write permissions on your address book, but also doesn't require you to copy/paste a JID from one app to another.