Mildly Infuriating

Steam is close but actually not electron, they use CEF - Chromium Embedded Framework which is something Electron uses too under the hood (afair)

I wouldn't mind so much if they all just used the same bundle of stuff, and you could install that once, and then the apps were all like 2MB each.

But no, big fucking bundle of shit, every single time.

I really want to see the zygote approach worked out for electron. It's working really well for android but with electron there are just too many different versions used by the different programs for that to make sense.

It's because it's an electron app. So in addition to the chat app itself, it also includes a full Chromium runtime. Worse still, the Electron architecture doesn't really lend itself towards reusing electron itself; this means you might have several copies of the same version of electron on your machine for various apps.

People complain about the sizes of things like flatpaks and snaps, but tbh the whole architecture of applications is like this these days. Ironically, flatpaks and snaps could help with this because their formats can work decently with filesystem level deduplication.

New messages will show on all your devices, but yes, it is intentional that old messages are not available to new devices.

Okay, but can't it be an optional feature? I'd like it if a new device could download message history from an old device by having both online at the same time.

Signal’s desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad

I think this is a bit dramatic. I've been using it for years, no problems.

Is Matrix another one of those apps that when you click on a download link it takes you to a page full of tech jargon shit like "nightly signed beta configs here, just unjibble the .trag file and recombobulate with a python scrab to mambo directory: AAATGFHHOLLLM56888NGAAA.tar.gz" ?

Or is it like an app normal people can use?

Your post encouraged me to self host Matrix ^^ That'll be a nice project for the next rainy day

No, that's a tarball of a kernel, basic command line tools, apt and a network stack that lets you download most of the operating system.

You can actually delete the data for good in both the android and windows software through the interface, and it works. But yeah the amount of data is staggering.

I've got a reminder in my calendar to delete the data on the first day of a new quarter, so this here is accumulated since April 1st:

And that's also a lot for an app that doesn't have that many binary assets like images or videos. I do wonder what makes up most of these sizes. I see other apps that are arguably more complicated - like AntennaPod - using under 40MB; So I guess it has to do with actual native apps vs cross platform ones.

They're talking about the desktop application.

They don’t even need to built a separate app if they have an iPad app. they just need to not „not allow“ the execution on macOS.

Unclear if unintented funny typo, or intended funny comment.