Dear Rocket.Chat community,
The mobile team of Rocket.Chat is very proud to announce the brand new version of our Android app for you, highlighting the following features and changes:
The reliability of the connection
We started the development of this app with one main goal: the networking layer needs to be perfect! We know that many of you had problems with the previous version of the app related to network connection, the app reconnecting many times and many network calls not working. Well, turns out that part of this problem was the code of the previous app, and this problem is gone now. The network layer of the application was complete rewritten, in a separated SDK (written in Kotlin, link here) that handles all the WebSocket and HTTP calls to the app, with a much more reliable solution than before.
Speed
The speed of this app is glorious. You’ll notice when you scroll throught the messages. It feels good, it never freezes the scrolling and everything that doesn’t depend on networking is as fast as it can be with the hardware available.
Offline support
This version doesn’t have offline support yet for all data. We do have offline support to one thing right now that we consider very important: sending messages. If you send a message and you’re offline, the app will handle the offline part for you and send it immediatly as you have internet connection. A more advanced offline support will be available soon in the next versions of the app.
Layout
We changed the layout. A lot. And for the better. 
As you open the app, you’ll notice that the layout is very straighforward. You’ll see your conversations sorted by activity, you can read the last message of the conversation without opening it and you can change the sorting of the list to be by activity or alphabetically (we’re adding more options in future releases). We really hope you like this layout and get to use even more the app.
The layout is evolving on every release and we’re sure that in the next releases you’ll be convinced that this layout is for the better, if you’re not convinced yet.
Authentication
Chats List
Emoji Keyboard + Reactions
Features
We tracked all the features you guys were requesting from the previous version and focused on the most important ones for now, and here it is:
- Authentication with OAuth: Google, GitHub, GitLab and LinkedIn (more services coming soon);
- Authentication with LDAP, CAS (SAML will be supported in future releases);
- Reactions;
- Emoji keyboard (custom emojis coming soon);
- Edit Profile;
- View image in full screen;
- Play video in full screen;
- Multiserver;
More features coming soon
We’ve already some features in development right now that will be released soon, here it is:
- List of files;
- Search messages in a chat;
- Grouping favorites;
- Unread messages on top;
- Create a new channel/group;
- Directory;
- Admin access;
- many more…
Requirements
The requirement of the app is that your server is running version 0.63 or newer.
The app also requires a valid SSL connection with your server. If you’re not sure that your server supports SSL right now, please use this link to check.
Open source
All the code of this application and also from the SDK are open source under MIT license. You can download everything, create new features, fix some bugs and of course, submit us some pull requests, we do appreciate.
Link to source code of the app: GitHub - RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.Android: Legacy mobile Rocket.Chat client in Kotlin for Android
Link to source code of the SDK: GitHub - RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.Kotlin.SDK: Rocket.Chat's Kotlin SDK (REST & WebSocket abstractions)
Contributors
We would really like to thank all of the contributors that helped us to construct this version of the app by submiting us pull requests or opening issues. Thank you very much for that!
- @divyanshub024
- @Shailesh351
- @robertwessen
- @samrmur
- @aniketsingh03
- @SyamSundarKirubakaran
- @pcforgeek
- @TheGamer007
- @leonardoaramaki
- @luciofm
- @filipedelimabrito
Leave us a review
If you like this updated, please leave us a positive review in our Google Play page and if you have some feedback, you can comment directly on this post or you can open an issue in our repository.
Download
To download this app via Google Play, click here.
If you want to directly download the .apk, you can download it from here.
