Convo is an attempt to support full-featured XMPP messaging on KaiOS button/feature phones. It is still experimental, but it can be used as a companion app for sending texts through your KaiOS/JioPhone device, while managing the more "advanced" functions (like adding a contact or sharing images) from a desktop or smartphone app.

What is KaiOS/JioPhone?

KaiOS is a mobile operating system for budget button-operated "feature phones". While smartphones have gained popularity across the world, feature phones are still popular among

• lower-income groups who can save by buying a budget phone
• people from higher-income groups looking to digitally detox or reduce usage of smartphones in their lives, either by getting a "dumbphone" as a secondary or weekend device or using it to replace their smartphone entirely
• dumbphone enthusiasts who want to practice digital minimalism and/or eschew today's trend of having one's whole life on a single device

JioPhone is a device and operating system released in India by the company behind the Jio telecom network. The JioPhone operating system is based on KaiOS, but their devices are usually locked down to the Jio network, and they have forked the KaiOS Store to use their own "Jio Store" instead. (Convo is not yet published on any of these stores; you have to install it manually).

What is XMPP?

XMPP is the eXtended Messaging and Presence Protocol. It's basically a open standard for Internet messaging (although it can be extended for other uses too). This is similar to how SMTP and IMAP are standards for sending emails.

Like email, XMPP is federated, meaning anyone can run their own XMPP-supporting service and use it to talk to people who have joined any other XMPP-supporting service.

Thanks to "transports" like Spectrum, it is also possible to talk to users on other services like Signal, Discord, and Telegram through your XMPP account, although that may not be officially supported by the services on the other end and tends to be a bit buggy.

Status of Convo

Convo is an XMPP-based messaging app for KaiOS (and JioPhone, which as mentioned before are practically the same thing). It is based on the ConverseJS webclient, which means it should theoretically support all features supported by ConverseJS. But since the UI has to be redone from scratch to work on KaiOS, only some of those features are currently exposed to the user.

Things you can do with Convo

• Sign into your XMPP account (only one account at a time)
• Browse your contact list and start a conversation with existing contacts (this includes contacts on other platforms, provided you have set up transports separately in some other XMPP client)
• Read and reply to incoming messages
• Look through the last 30 messages of conversation history (this has been limited due to a memory issue, and will hopefully be fixed in future)
• Close a conversation so that it goes away from the list
• View images shared by other people

Things you might expect to be able to do but actually can't

• Start a conversation with someone not in your contact list
• Join or participate in groupchats (this is technically possible but has been temporarily disabled due to groupchats getting flooded with messages and blowing up Convo's memory usage)
• Share images from your phone
• Get notifications when you receive a message
• Automatically check for messages even when the app is closed

Most of the above features are easily fixed once I (or someone else) get around to implementing the UI.

Encrypted chats

Most modern XMPP cilents support end-to-end encryption using OMEMO. This is supported by ConverseJS as well, but unfortunately not in the headless version that Convo is using. This pull request has more details on this issue.

Your donations

I (badrihippo) have not been able to find much time to work on Convo, due to being busy with freelance work as well as other Free Software projects. If I receive donations to this project, I pledge to reserve as much time for Convo as matches with the donation, according to my current freelance rate (currently ~7.5 USD per hour).

My first priority will be to finish the ConverseJS pull request, which will allow me to add support for OMEMO-based message encryption in Convo. Going by last time, this should take me about 2-3 weeks.

After this, I will work on other features that are being tracked in the repo's Projects and Issues.