Android 2.0.0 released

Announcements
1

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. :slight_smile:

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

Authentication
Authentication720Ă—1232 31.5 KB

Chats List

Chats List
Chats List720Ă—1232 111 KB

Emoji Keyboard + Reactions

Emoji Keyboard + Reactions
Emoji Keyboard + Reactions720Ă—1232 137 KB

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. :slight_smile:

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!

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.

4 Likes
2

Maybe there are some missing infos in the normal play store master channel?

Beta Channel: New Screenshots, new version number 2.0.0, new text for “new functions”

Master Channel: New Screenshots, old version number 1.1.0, old text for “new functions”, kind of newly description

I checked it on an device without the beta opt in - there is no available update to 2.0.0 yet.
If 2.0.0. is not fully released yet feel free to delete this comment :slight_smile:

3

You’re right, the app is still in release process (50% of the users), we’re moving to 100% today. :+1:

1 Like
4

Thank you for the update.

The new layout took a few seconds to get use to, but it looks much better!

One problem however, some attachment options are missing from the previous version, like video recorder, audio clip recorder; and I am still holding on for the camera functionality :frowning:

1 Like
5

Thank you for the feedback!

We’re working hard to include all these other options into the app. In the meantime, you can record videos/audios and take photos with other apps and then import into Rocket.Chat by using the “+” button.