It’s in Beta — what does that mean? 🚧

RiotX is still in very active development, but we’ve put out a Beta release because it’s “ready enough” for you to try it out and let us know what you think. Being in Beta means:

Some features are not yet implemented

The features that are implemented almost certainly still have bugs!

The UX may be incomplete in some places, and may well change before we exit beta

We’re not fully stable yet — you should expect the app to occasionally crash

We’ve implemented feedback mechanisms in the app for beta users to report bugs and suggest features — please hit the menu in the top right to submit feedback or shake the phone to report a bug. The whole point of the beta is to gather feedback, so please keep it coming!

All new interface! 🦋

RiotX is experimenting with some major changes to the user interface:

We’ve removed the horizontal-scrolling ‘Home’ screen in favour of a much simpler home screen which just lists the rooms with unread messages so you can quickly catch up on what you’ve missed. (In practice this is how most people seemed to be using the old Home screen)

We’ve removed the Communities tab. Communities now live in a slidey draw on the left hand side — this is in preparation for communities getting a major facelift and becoming much more useful.

We’ve removed the Favourites tab; if you have favourites they now sit at the top of the conversation list in a section of their own.

As a result, the app should be much much simpler and lighter to use!

Which features are ready and what is still to do? 🚀

On top of the dramatic performance improvements already achieved through the rewrite, we’ve focused on delivering the most valuable functionality up front. In RiotX you can already:

Login to an existing account

Create a room and join public rooms

Accept and reject invitations

List rooms you’re in

Chat in end-to-end encrypted rooms

Verify devices for encryption by comparing emoji

Restore end-to-end encryption backups

Send and receive files

Receive push notifications

Light, Dark and Black themes

Configure your user settings using a nice configuration hierarchy (shamelessly stolen from Riot/Web)

Edit messages and react to them with emoji! (experimental)

There’s a lot of work still to do to achieve the same feature set as the existing Riot/Android app — some of the most notable omissions are:

Account creation

No identity server support yet

Handling unsent messages

Searching for rooms by name

Room settings (list room members, etc.)

Room versions (upgrades; awareness of multiple versions)

Search

Read marker support

Creation of direct chat rooms

1:1 and conference VoIP/Video calls

Integrations

OMG, it has editable messages & reactions!!! ❤️

Yes, yes, it does :) These are experimental (MSC1849) and the latest develop versions of Riot/Web and Riot/iOS have them too. Feel free to play with them; we’ll announce them properly when they’re ready!

How does this relate to Riot/Android? 🐼

For now, Riot/Android is still available but only getting minimal bug fixes and maintenance work. All new features (e.g. Edits, Reactions, Encryption cross-signing etc) will land on RiotX. Moreover, once RiotX has feature parity with Riot/Android, we will likely rename RiotX as Riot and replace today’s Riot with it entirely.

So, there you have it. Welcome to RiotX, and we hope you have fun testing the beta. Please let us know how you get on!