I only made my account yesterday, so I went to try out the Android apps. I know Element is the official one, but I was curious about the alternatives.

Apparently Fluffy supports multiple accounts - which I’d honestly expect to be a basic feature - and also appears to be more lightweight.

Schildi is apparently a fork of Element and I like its look the most. I’m so sick of Google’s rounded rectangles, that I jump on every opportunity to use an app that doesn’t have that “design language”.

When testing, I ran into two problems with Fluffy: notifications don’t seem to work at all (which is ironic, because I finally registered with Matrix because Discord completely stopped doing notifications for me), and I couldn’t figure out how to reinitialize verification. Also, my first attempt to register an acct was with this client, and it couldn’t show a captcha.

On the other hand, I can copy my username into clipboard easily, which is such an important thing that messengers keep forgetting to include.

Schildi seems to work reliably, buuut I guess it can only receive notification through a resident notification and a service that takes up 200 megs of memory? That’s really not good for my old low end phone. Maybe the F-Droid version is omitting GMS integration since it looks like there’s a settings selection missing…?

(Ed: Of course, I forgot that F-Droid won’t host GMS, and Google mandates a permanent notification if one doesn’t use GMS. Lack of sleep, lack of memory.)

Guess I’ll be trying the default app after all.

Anyone has time to troubleshoot stuff that I might need to figure out? Gotta admit this is a tad more confusing at times than what I expected.

Ed ed: ok I have ntfy now and am satisfied. Met a lot of cool and helpful people in support rooms of these clients. I think I’m liking this Matrix thing.