Android and iOS Apps - no html wrapper?

Troubleshooting
1

Hi Everybody,
first of all I wanna say how outstanding mattermost really is for me. It is such a great project. I’m teacher at a german school with about 800 students and we have to provide a modern and secure communications platform away from messengers like WhatsApp. And Mattermost is really the thing we searched for long time now. Thanks team for developing this tool!
I set up a server yesterday and tested iOS and Android apps and i found out that these seem to be wrappers for mobile webpages, am I right? The Apps loose connection in phone standby mode and also they give no notifications (not on lockscreen, no notification LED on android). They are also versy slow on mobile connection (EDGE). Am I doing something wrong or am I right? If so, are there mobile apps being developed which are more like the messengers we use today? Working Notifications, fast and more responsive even on slow connections?

Bye,
David

2

Hi @Kalimero,

Thank you for the kind words, we’d love to have your students use Mattermost for communicating,

Regarding mobile notifications, they currently function based on email notifications (only sent when you miss a message while disconnected), and in Mattermost 3.1, releasing June 16, there should be an option to make them work more like desktop notifications, which message you even when you’re online.

Functionality of push notifications shouldn’t be affected by connection speed, it’s probably more expectations of how they should work (which has already been addressed in code, you just need to wait until the next release).

Regarding HTML rendering and performance, we have benchmarks published on response times for iOS and Android apps on networks 4G and higher and performance seems competitive to full native apps.

Would these benchmarks be acceptable for your uses?

Because EDGE and 3G networks are declining around the world, it hasn’t been a top priority to support those standards.

That said, performance is an area we want to constantly improve and contributions to increase performance on slow connections would be highly welcome.

3

Hi @it33,
thanks for your answer! So, to sum up: There will be no native iOS or Android Apps, you are focusing more on the html-wrapper, right?
Will these Apps become to feel more like messengers we know of (like Whatsapp, Telegram…) with notification sound on incoming messages, notifications on our lockscreen? I guess this is something users really expect and how you could users get to change from the mentioned messengers to use Mattermost. If this is the direction you wanna go at all.

Bye,
Kalimero

5

Hi @Kalimero

We are currently working on native apps for iOS and Android and I wanted to pop in and give you the link to the testing instructions in case you’d be interested to see how we’ve progressed and might be keen to help test?

Thanks!