The ultimate secure communication gateway
FrozenChat is a FORK of "Conversations", an awesome XMPP client for android with great features.
We decided to fork it "just for fun", in order to provide a powerful and personalized android client for our XMPP server (chat.frozenbox.org)
- Be as beautiful and easy to use as possible without sacrificing security or privacy
- Rely on existing, well established protocols (XMPP)
- Do not require a Google Account or specifically Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)
- Require as few permissions as possible
- End-to-end encryption with either OTR or OpenPGP
- Sending and receiving images
- Indication when your contact has read your message
- Intuitive UI that follows Android Design guidelines
- Pictures / Avatars for your Contacts
- Syncs with desktop client
- Conferences (with support for bookmarks)
- Address book integration
- Multiple accounts / unified inbox
- Very low impact on battery life
Frozenchat works with every XMPP server out there. However XMPP is an extensible protocol. These extensions are standardized as well in so called XEP's. Frozenchat supports a couple of these to make the overall user experience better. There is a chance that your current XMPP server does not support these extensions; therefore to get the most out of Frozenchat you should consider either switching to an XMPP server that does or — even better — run your own XMPP server for you and your friends. These XEP's are:
- XEP-0065: SOCKS5 Bytestreams (or mod_proxy65). Will be used to transfer files if both parties are behind a firewall (NAT).
- XEP-0163: Personal Eventing Protocol for avatars
- XEP-0198: Stream Management allows XMPP to survive small network outages and changes of the underlying TCP connection.
- XEP-0280: Message Carbons which automatically syncs the messages you send to your desktop client and thus allows you to switch seamlessly from your mobile client to your desktop client and back within one conversation.
- XEP-0237: Roster Versioning mainly to save bandwidth on poor mobile connections
- XEP-0313: Message Archive Management synchronize message history with the server. Catch up with messages that were sent while Frozenchat was offline.
- XEP-0352: Client State Indication lets the server know whether or not Frozenchat is in the background. Allows the server to save bandwidth by withholding unimportant packages.
- XEP-0191: Blocking command lets you blacklist spammers or block contacts without removing them from your roster.
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Lorenzo "EclipseSpark" Faletra
-
Davide TheZero
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Frozenbox Dev Team
(In order of appearance)
- Ilia Rostovtsev (Progress)
- Diego Turtulici (Original)
Translations are managed on Transifex
FrozenChat can be downloaded from the main page of our chat services (http://chat.frozenbox.org)
FrozenChat is entirely open source and licensed under GPLv3. So if you are a software developer you can check out the sources from GitHub and use ant to build your apk file.
Building instructions are available in the end of this readme file.
REMEMBER that FrozenChat is a fork of the original Conversations XMPP client developed by SIACS that offers its source code for free (as in freedom) and in order to finance their project they decided to offer the official client on Google Play Store with a little fee. So you'reinvited to try also the original version of the software and contribute with a little donation, or if you want to donate without buy the app feel free to make a free donation to the team. THEY DESERVE THAT DAMN COFFEE!!
They accept donations over PayPal, Bitcoin and Flattr. For donations via PayPal you
can use the email address donate@siacs.eu or the button below.
Disclaimer: The team is not a huge fan of PayPal and their business policies. For larger contributions please get in touch with them beforehand in order to talk about bank transfer (SEPA) directly with the original software developer.
Their Bitcoin Address is: 1NxSU1YxYzJVDpX1rcESAA3NJki7kRgeeu
We started this project in order to provide an official client for our XMPP server, so you're welcome on our server :) just register a new user on chat.frozenbox.org by typing your username followed by "chat.frozenbox.org" like an email address (myuser@chat.frozenbox.org), then select the related option to create a new user on that server and enter the desired password twice to create a new user.
BUT REMEMBER: feel free to use any server you want, not only the Frozenbox one, you are free to contact any user registered in any xmpp server in any case, whatever server you're registered at.
XMPP, like email, is a federated protocol which means that there is not one company you can create an 'official XMPP account' with. Instead there are hundreds, or even thousands, of provider out there. To find one use a web search engine of your choice. Or maybe your university has one. Or you can run your own. Or ask a friend to run one. Once you've found one, you can use Frozenchat to create an account. Just select 'register new account on server' within the create account dialog.
You can join our conference room on welcome@conference.chat.frozenbox.org A lot of people in there are able to answer basic questions about the usage of Frozenchat or can provide you with tips on running your own XMPP server. If you found a bug or your app crashes please read the Developer / Report Bugs section of this document.
Feel free to contact us on the server itself or by email chat@frozenbox.org
Or feel free to hire the original "Conversations" developer at inputmice@siacs.eu.
The address book integration was designed to protect your privacy. Frozenchat neither uploads contacts from your address book to your server nor fills your address book with unnecessary contacts from your online roster. If you manually add a Jabber ID to your phones address book Frozenchat will use the name and the profile picture of this contact. To make the process of adding Jabber IDs to your address book easier you can click on the profile picture in the contact details within Frozenchat. This will start an "add to address book" intent with the JID as the payload. This doesn't require Frozenchat to have write permissions on your address book but also doesn't require you to copy/paste a JID from one app to another.
If you get delivery failed on images it's probably because the recipient lost network connectivity during reception. In that case you can try it again at a later time.
For text messages the answer to your question is a little bit more complex. When you see 'delivery failed' on text messages, it is always something that is being reported by the server. The most common reason for this is that the recipient failed to resume a connection. When a client loses connectivity for a short time the client usually has a five minute window to pick up that connection again. When the client fails to do so because the network connectivity is out for longer than that all messages sent to that client will be returned to the sender resulting in a delivery failed.
Other less common reasons are that the message you sent didn't meet some criteria enforced by the server (too large, too many). Another reason could be that the recipient is offline and the server doesn't provide offline storage.
Usually you are able to distinguish between these two groups in the fact that the first one happens always after some time and the second one happens almost instantly.
Statuses are a horrible metric. Setting them manually to a proper value rarely works because users are either lazy or just forget about them. Setting them automatically does not provide quality results either. Keyboard or mouse activity as indicator for example fails when the user is just looking at something (reading an article, watching a movie). Furthermore automatic setting of status always implies an impact on your privacy (are you sure you want everybody in your contact list to know that you have been using your computer at 4am‽).
In the past status has been used to judge the likelihood of whether or not your messages are being read. This is no longer necessary. With Chat Markers (XEP-0333, supported by Frozenchat since 0.4) we have the ability to know whether or not your messages are being read. Similar things can be said for priorities. In the past priorities have been used (by servers, not by clients!) to route your messages to one specific client. With carbon messages (XEP-0280, supported by Frozenchat since 0.1) this is no longer necessary. Using priorities to route OTR messages isn't practical either because they are not changeable on the fly. Metrics like last active client (the client which sent the last message) are much better.
Unfortunately these modern replacements for legacy XMPP features are not widely adopted. However Frozenchat should be an instant messenger for the future and instead of making Frozenchat compatible with the past we should work on implementing new, improved technologies and getting them into other XMPP clients as well.
Making these status and priority optional isn't a solution either because Frozenchat is trying to get rid of old behaviours and set an example for other clients.
I'm open for new feature suggestions. Contact us via email at chat@frozenbox.org.
But i also suggest to contact the original "Conversations" project, they have a well managed tracking system on their GitHub page.
In most cases OTR should be the encryption method of choice. It works out of the box with most contacts as long as they are online. However PGP can, in some cases, (message carbons to multiple clients) be more flexible.
Before you continue reading you should note that the OpenPGP support in Frozenchat is experimental. This is not because it will make the app unstable but because the fundamental concepts of PGP aren't ready for widespread use. The way PGP works is that you trust Key IDs instead of JID's or email addresses. So in theory your contact list should consist of Public-Key-IDs instead of JID's. But of course no email or XMPP client out there implements these concepts. Plus PGP in the context of instant messaging has a couple of downsides: It is vulnerable to replay attacks, it is rather verbose, and decrypting and encrypting takes longer than OTR. It is however asynchronous and works well with message carbons.
To use OpenPGP you have to install the open source app OpenKeychain and then long press on the account in manage accounts and choose renew PGP announcement from the contextual menu.
For conferences the only supported encryption method is OpenPGP (OTR does not work with multiple participants). Every participant has to announce their OpenPGP key (see answer above). If you would like to send encrypted messages to a conference you have to make sure that you have every participant's public key in your OpenKeychain. Right now there is no check in Frozenchat to ensure that. You have to take care of that yourself. Go to the conference details and touch every key id (The hexadecimal number below a contact). This will send you to OpenKeychain which will assist you on adding the key. This works best in very small conferences with contacts you are already using OpenPGP with. This feature is regarded experimental. Frozenchat is the only client that uses XEP-0027 with conferences. (The XEP neither specifically allows nor disallows this.)
Install the Android-SDK on your operating system (we use debian or parrot)
Install possible missing libraries/modules/packages
Make sure to have ANDROID_HOME point to your Android SDK usually it is located at /usr/share/android-sdk
Then fetch and build the source code
git clone https://github.com/frozenbox/frozenchat.git
cd Frozenchat
./gradlew build
If the library you want to update is in Maven Central or JCenter (or has its own
Maven repo), add it or update its version in build.gradle. If the library is
in the libs/ directory, you can update it using a subtree merge by doing the
following (using minidns as an example):
git remote add minidns https://github.com/rtreffer/minidns.git
git fetch minidns
git merge -s subtree minidns master
To add a new dependency to the libs/ directory (replacing "name", "branch" and
"url" as necessary):
git remote add name url
git merge -s ours --no-commit name/branch
git read-tree --prefix=libs/name -u name/branch
git commit -m "Subtree merged in name"
If something goes wrong Frozenchat usually exposes very little information in the UI (other than the fact that something didn't work). However with adb (android debug bridge) you squeeze some more information out of Frozenchat. These information are especially useful if you are experiencing trouble with your connection or with file transfer.
adb -d logcat -v time -s frozenchat
Please report it to our issue tracker. If your app crashes please provide a stack trace. If you are experiencing misbehaviour please provide detailed steps to reproduce. Always mention whether you are running the latest Play Store version or the current HEAD. If you are having problems connecting to your XMPP server your file transfer doesn’t work as expected please always include a logcat debug output with your issue (see above).