howsite-obsidian/Choosing a client.md

The first step is choosing a client. There are many of these for every major platform, except iOS sadly.

Android

The most popular client is Conversations. It's paid on the Play store, however it's also free on F-Droid. There's also 2 popular forks of Conversations: Cheogram and monocles Chat.

• Cheogram is on the Play store and F-Droid, and has some small improvements from Conversations, the main one being proper replies.
• monocles Chat is a fork of Cheogram, adding a redesigned UI and tabbed navigation. There's many other tweaks too, like chat wallpapers and such.

iOS

TODO

Desktop

• Gajim is the most well-known on desktop. It's primarily on Linux, although there's also an official Windows version (currently still on 1.9.5 due to font rendering issues) and an official guide for installing it on MacOS.
• Dino is also popular on desktop, and recently got a 0.5.0 release. It's faster than Gajim but has less features, especially for moderation.

Web

• Movim is the most common web client, and has things like stories. Its primary feature is social media, however there's also IM. OMEMO is off by default and has bugs, so it's really only good for non-sensitive chats.
• ConverseJS is another client, more suited for instant messaging.

Next step

After you choose a client, the next step is choosing a server.