The project is a mess, which is obvious if one follows it. There is only slow progress. Instead of focusing everyone on one thing to do it right, they focus on multiple things that remain half-baked forever, e.g. multiple concurrent implementations like Synapse and Dendrite, Element and Hydrogen, Element and Element X, etc. pp. They seem to have organizational challenges, stemming from technical founders who didn’t know that it takes more than technical knowledge to build a great product. I believe they’ve learned somethings, e.g. that Element’s UI has always been crap hence Element X now, which they’ve denied for a long time. But they are surely still learning, e.g. how to be a focused and decisive leader, etc.

A project is always in large a reflection of the leaders. It’s the messy hackathon type project - not the clear and polished corporate project.

The reason historically for multiple concurrent implementations is because we're building a protocol, and multiple implementations dogfoods that - plus the different implementations service different segments. In practice, Hydrogen and Dendrite are currently deprioritised in favour of focusing on polishing Element X and Synapse. And Element Mobile is in security-maintenance mode only in favour of Element X.

Meanwhile, we massively fixed Element Mobile's UI a year ago: https://element.io/blog/an-unrecognisable-improvement-elemen... - and Element X is essentially the same UI... but on a different engine. So I'd argue that we were very aware that Element's UI was crap, which is why we fixed it. Rewriting the Element mobile apps as Element X is unquestionably the right thing to do in terms of sharing the same rust codebase between the two platforms and letting the app layer focus on UI.

Agreed that our progress has been slow, and our focus been has very broad at points. But we got there in the end, and certainly have learned from the journey (and built Matrix to be a much broader and successful heterogenous ecosystem as a result).

I'm sure your projects are all much more successful though - I'm jealous! :D

As a very longtime user, I can say that the progress has been noticeable to me, especially in the last year or two.

Having had a look at Element X (Android), it actually feels to me like that responsiveness is pretty much the last thing I was missing.

Oh, and the call bug already mentioned in the thread.

I'm really happy with Element and thankful for all the work you guys put into it.

>Element’s UI has always been crap

I use Element after switching from Google Hangouts/Chat/$LATEST_NAME$ a long time ago.

What, specifically, are you saying has always been crap about it?

Personally, I have no complaints about Element's UI. It works great IMO.

And I consider myself pretty hard to please and easy to irritate.

Actually, thinking about it now, the one thing I would prefer is if you could, in a 2-person room, have one participant's messages come up on the left while your own were on the right, or vice versa.

Then it would be more obvious who said what.

I like the honesty; oddly it has the opposite effect on me.