Psst… don’t tell anyone, but: Android development on Element X has now caught up with iOS and we’ve released an early edition of Element X in the Google Play Store.
Since we published our first release of Element X for iOS on the App Store in July, we’ve been swamped with Android users asking how to get involved too; and so now we’re officially making Element X goodness available on both platforms.
As a reminder, Element X is the fastest Matrix client ever - up to 6000x faster than any other Matrix client; and aims to be not just the best Matrix client, but the best messaging app in the world; better than Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage and other mainstream messaging apps.
In particular, Element X provides instant launch, instant sync and instant login (once your account is warmed up). It also has a far cleaner - more intuitive - interface, making it quicker and delightful to use. Under the hood, we’ve rewritten the engine of the app in Rust, giving spectacular performance and sharing reliability between both iOS & Android.
Now, today’s release isn’t finished yet; it focuses on messaging rather than collaboration use cases (so no filters, threads or spaces), encryption UI isn’t finished, and account registration and management isn’t hooked up yet. However, it’s still very usable as a daily driver for experienced users, and so this is intended as a preview to let more early adopters play with the app as soon as possible (and see how well it performs in the wild!). Meanwhile we’ll be following up with a much broader release once account management is in place in a few weeks.
To use Element X you need a homeserver with sliding sync support (e.g. matrix.org). Support in Element Cloud is coming shortly, and much much more - watch this space! Please let us know how you get on at #element-x-android, and please submit feedback from within the app if you hit any bugs.
Not just the “lack of APKs”, but the lack of a FOSS build. As you noted, it is possible to instal an AAB by extracting the APK(s) inside, but that doesn’t magically remove non-foss libraries.
You need Firebase for notification support on 99% of phones. It supports unifiedpush as well but you’ll have to build it yourself if you want to get rid of Firebase support entirely.