[guardian-dev] jmp.chat - SMS for XMPP (Zom/ChatSecure/Conversations/etc)

[Denver Gingerich]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 09:12:14AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Denver Gingerich <denver at ossguy.com> writes:
> > The main reason for recommending CSipSimple is that it appears to be
> > the only Android SIP client that reliably rings on incoming calls.
> > User reports suggest that other SIP clients (including the built-in
> > client) often miss calls, which we want to avoid.
> 
> I see.  That may be true on linphone.  I didn't end up talking to people
> much on sip as it was.

That tends to be the case for most JMP users - they are mainly interested in the text and picture messaging aspects of the service so that is where we tend to prioritize our work.

To correct my earlier statement: the issue with Android's built-in SIP client is not that it misses calls (it tends to be about as reliable as CSipSimple in that regard), but rather that it suffers from fairly severe echo problems in the versions of Android that we've tested.  There appears to be a setting that will enable echo-cancellation for the built-in client, but it can only be changed if the phone is rooted, which is why we recommend CSipSimple instead.

> > While CSipSimple does appear to be somewhat unmaintained, we're not
> 
> If it's only "somewhat", that's much better than I thought.  I was
> unable to find an upstream repo or bugtracker, or a single person who
> was paying attention.  If you have pointers to anything, it would be
> good to add those to your page.

Which page do you mean?

I do see discussions of a new upstream at https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/com.csipsimple - that's probably where to start if you'd like to contribute.

I'm not sure how we should be adding this information to any of the pages on https://jmp.chat/ as we don't currently discuss the upstream repo or bugtracker for other projects that we link to, so it would be a bit strange to do so just for CSipSimple.  People can normally find that information through the F-Droid page or similar (which we do generally link to).

> > Linphone seems to work well for many people, though it doesn't ring as
> > reliably as CSipSimple.  If your use case doesn't require that, then
> > it may be exactly what you're looking for.
> 
> It might be easier for you to fix the reliablity problems with linhphone
> than to resurrect csipsimple :-)

This may be something we do eventually - in the meantime, patches are welcome. :)  The primary issue with Linphone for Android is that it does not stay running in the background.  I'm not sure how easy it is to fix that.  If we do get some more development time to look into the SIP side of things, that is likely where we'll start.


Thanks for your feedback!

Denver
https://jmp.chat/