Moving my family to conversations (XMPP)

Conversations is really awesome. It is a secure, private and decentralized chat app. There is no privacy invading ads company like meta running the service. I was sold and wanted to try it out with my family. Only one small issue - conversations costs ₹550 in the play store. People don't like paying for software in our country. They would say:

"I can eat for a week with 500 rupees. Let meta have my data and give me WhatsApp for free."

I have lost this argument many times. Fine, we need not pay for it right now. So, I told my brother about F-Droid - an app store with only free apps. Since our parents cannot install the app by themselves, he would set up their accounts too. I live away. So, I had to guide him through each step on the phone. Little did I know that this would turn out to be much harder than I had anticipated.

Installing F-Droid

My brother opened Chrome in his phone and searched for F-Droid. He found the website and clicked "download apk". He told me it had disappeared. That's weird. I told him to download it again. This time, it asked "Do you want to download this file again?". Huh. Maybe it was already downloaded, so we went searching for it in files. We found it after some digging. I then got him to "allow unknown sources" and to install it. It was buried in the ginormous list of bloatware apps that came with his phone.

Installing conversations

F-Droid greeted us with an empty list of apps. We pressed the refresh - nothing. After waiting for 5 minutes, we hung up the phone. I called him back after a couple of hours. The repository has synced by then. We were elated to finally see a list of apps and install conversations.

Setting up accounts

My brother comes home every Sunday. So, we had to do this today. He created 3 accounts - one for each of their phones. But, he made our parents accounts on the wrong phones by mistake. So, he had to log out the account from each of their phones and login to the right accounts. But there was catch:

He forgot their passwords. He wrote the passwords down on a piece of paper, but our mom locked it away for safety and went out.

I could have killed myself here, but I restrained. We decided to update the profile names instead. I couldn't see their updated names until I deleted their contacts and added them back.

Conclusion

I later found Quicksy in the play store. It is the same as Conversations, but with the convenience of registering an account with a phone number - no need of user IDs and passwords. Instead of going through all this trouble, I should have asked them to install Quicksy. Sending SMS is costly. Then, why is this app free but not conversations? Why don't they have just one app that lets you register using both options?

I now understand the UX barrier to open source technologies a bit better. Open source needs to invest in design and simplify user onboarding. Otherwise, the unethical counterparts will keep winning.