Developers , a free XMPP client for the platform , the project's tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, on August 23, 2009, the for yaxim was made and this means that today this XMPP client is officially half as old as the protocol it operates on. Since those early days, many changes have occurred both in XMPP itself and in the Android system.
2009: the beginning
In 2009, the Android platform was still brand new and lacked a free IM client. There were rumors and announcements, but no one had yet published working code. The first concrete hint was a presentation by German students Sven and Chris, showcasing their semester project .
. They received some friendly emails, created a project on GitHub, and continued to write code. At the end of the year, another was shown at the 26C3 conference. A major issue for yaxim at that time was reliable message delivery, but things gradually improved.
Significant changes
In 2010, YAXIM was renamed to yaxim to resemble a name more and less like a screaming acronym. In 2013, the project , a younger sibling of yaxim, was created as an XMPP client for children and anyone who loves animals. It currently has nearly 2000 active users.
Also in 2013, the XMPP server , was launched primarily to make using yaxim and Bruno easier, as well as to have a stable and reliable server suitable for mobile clients.
Finally, in 2016, yaxim got its current logo, featuring an image of a yak.
Development dynamics
From day one, yaxim was an amateur project, without commercial support and without permanent developers. Over the years, its code grew quite slowly, with 2015 being particularly unproductive. Despite yaxim having a larger number of installations on Google Play compared to , the latter, as some say, is the main client on Android and very popular among XMPP users. However, at least over the last three years, there has been no decrease in the number of devices on which yaxim is installed (Google does not provide statistics until 2016).
Current challenges
The core code of yaxim (Smack 3.x, ActionBarSherlock) is quite outdated, and significant efforts are currently being made to ensure that yaxim looks good on modern Android devices (Material Design) and supports contemporary features like interactive permission dialogs and battery saving, as well as the protocol (which ). Test versions with the latest developments are offered through on Google Play.
Source: opennet.ru
