Conversations

Conversations is an Android client for XMPP, the open messaging standard also called Jabber, where anyone can run a server and users of different servers talk to each other, as with e-mail. Its README: “Easy to use, reliable, and battery-friendly. With built-in support for images, group chats, and location sharing. End-to-end encrypted by default.” It was created in 2014 by Daniel Gultsch, who still leads it, and is developed on Codeberg. Several other XMPP apps, among them Snikket, monocles chat and Cheogram, are built on its code.

What it does

• Chats and group chats, private ones and public channels, with multiple accounts in one inbox.
• Encryption with OMEMO or OpenPGP.
• Audio and video calls, encrypted with DTLS-SRTP.
• Images, files, voice messages, location and emoji reactions.
• Address book integration, to find contacts who use XMPP.
• It can act as a UnifiedPush distributor, delivering notifications to other apps such as Tusky, DAVx⁵ or Fennec; this is off by default.

The README adds: “Some of these features require server support.”

Defaults worth knowing

From the code of this version:

• OMEMO is on for new chats, as above.
• Files up to 512 kilobytes download automatically, but only from people in your contact list.
• Connections require TLS 1.3. On new installations, channel binding is required too unless you switch that requirement off. The system’s certificate store is trusted except for eMudhra root certificates, which version 2.21.0 explicitly excludes.
• After a crash, the app asks whether to send a report; if you agree, it goes as an XMPP message to the developers, without end-to-end encryption.

What goes online

• Your XMPP server, all the time, and through it your contacts’ servers.
• Your contacts’ phones, directly, during calls and file transfers, unless you turn on relays.
• Only when you use them: the public channel search at search.jabber.network, after a first opt-in, OpenStreetMap tiles for locations, the help pages, the push server up.conversations.im if you turn on the UnifiedPush distributor, and Tor if you enable it.

There are no analytics, link previews or update check.

About this file

• This is the developer’s own build of version 2.21.0, the F-Droid edition, for 64-bit ARM. F-Droid rebuilt it from the tagged source, compared it with the developer’s file and distributes that file, signed by Daniel Gultsch; F-Droid also offers builds signed with its own key, which can’t update this one. The Google Play edition is a separate build that adds Google’s push service; Exodus Privacy’s report shows it with the same certificate. Version 2.21.0’s two published changes are the new channel-binding default and the eMudhra exclusion described above.
• The 30.8 MB file runs on Android 6.0 and later and declares 51 permissions: contacts, the camera and microphone for calls and photos, location for sharing it, media access, the foreground service that keeps the connection, battery-optimization and full-screen call permissions, handing APK files you receive to Android’s installer, and over a dozen for unread badges on various launchers.
• Conversations is licensed under the GPL-3.0; its logo and artwork under CC BY-SA 4.0. This edition bundles Google’s Noto Color Emoji font, under the Open Font License.
• The screenshots are the project’s own, from April 2024, a few versions before this one.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.