Goodbye JMP.chat :(
I've been a fairly happy JMP customer for about 1 year now, on Android. After installing their cheogram Android app, the service works with the Android native, contacts are resolved in messages and in phone calls. It doesn't integrate with the Android SMS/MMS messaging app, so I still have to use cheogram for that, but honestly this hasn't been an issue for me.
Times are changing though, and I really need to be daily driving Nura on my phone. While traveling for the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference, I was daily driving Duranium (immutable Nura) on a laptop and managed to find/fix quite a few small issues with the distro. It's unlikely I would have found these if I wasn't trying to rely on the devices every day. I wonder how many little issues I would find on Duranium if I was running it on my main phone...
I spent many hours over the past few weeks trying to make JMP work well enough for me on Nura, but I failed. So I'm faced with this choice: keep hacking around a service few people use (and even fewer on Linux Mobile), or spend that time fixing and polishing Duranium? I think I have to choose the latter, and it's kinda heartbreaking because I want to use JMP!
To be clear before I go through the specifics, I don't want to dump on them, and this isn't a reflection of the service's quality. I really think JMP is cool tech. Being able to access SMS/MMS, and phone calls with just a connection to the internet is magical. When traveling abroad, I can still make and receive calls to folks back home using my normal phone number and there's no "roaming". It's very hard for me to give this up.
The problem is that trying to use JMP with the GNOME (50) stack just isn't great for me for a number of reasons:
- Calling: there's no viable path for me. GNOME Calls has no xmpp/jingle support, and SIP doesn't work for me at all in a way that isn't trivial to debug/fix (even though multiple reports say it works for others 🤷). IIUC Calls would resolve contacts for SIP.
- Contact resolution: GNOME Chat natively supports XMPP, yay, and it does resolve contacts via libfolks, but not for the
+<number>@cheogram.comXMPP format. So I get a lot of messages from "+xxxxxxxxx@cheogram.com" and have no clue who they are unless I manually look up the number in the Contacts app. This sucks a lot. - Dino / gajim: don't resolve contacts either, and it's not trivial to get them running in the background on boot so it's easy to miss messages. I didn't try voice calls with either of these because of the two issues above it is a non-starter for me.
"What about app.cheogram.com?", they say... Well... it's a web app, and it doesn't integrate with any native apps, so this doesn't address anything I need.
I'd happily be back if I could use the native apps (Calls, Chat) for calling and SMS/messaging with this service. But for now, I need to find a different carrier.