Speaking as the CEO/CTO of Element... the classic Element apps on mobile were buggy, thanks to being a ~10 year old codebase with no shared code between platforms and effectively the 1st generation Matrix client. Which is why we replaced them over the last few years with Element X, with all the heavy lifting shared between iOS & Android via matrix-rust-sdk (effectively a 3rd gen Matrix SDK).
That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
Meanwhile, Element Web is lagging behind Element X - but we're now in the middle of an incremental in-place upgrade (not a big-bang rewrite, thank goodness) to use matrix-rust-sdk - see our talk from FOSDEM last Sunday for the details: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/DZJVTS-an-element-web...
> That said, 70% of our users haven't got the memo yet - we'll do a hard-upgrade when the remaining missing features in Element X (Spaces & Threads) are fully out of Labs.
This isn't users not getting the memo yet, this is users being faced with an unfortunate choice between a buggy, slow client and a new client that doesn't implement important functionality like Spaces and Threads.
Can i ask why is Element Classic even available on the Google Play Store? If you want people to move away from this?
I've only started my Matrix journey, in the form of writing bots using the matrix Python library. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, as the Matrix protocol could be really impactful.
When Element X first launched, the goal was for it to cover the personal messenger use case. This worked just fine for some people, but for many, feature parity with the old apps and parity with the web experience was a hard blocker.
Both Spaces and Threads are about to land, and there are other lower-profile features that also need rounding out. We would expect full parity by April this year. At which point migration should be an obvious choice.
I’m excited to watch the talk. I’m generally critical of Matrix, but that’s because I want it to succeed. Lately I find you’ve been doing a lot of things right, so I hope you keep going!
I assumed it was because people here are constantly telling Arathorn that Element (not ElementX) is slow and buggy, and that when they last tried the default server (circa 2019 or so) is was buggy and full of rough edges
He's (in my mind) always positive, open, and willing to admit the shortcomings of the platform he shephards... but damn does he deal with a lot of undeserved criticism (and deserved criticism, where applicable)
Remember back when they built these businesses out of thin air, they would hire for the type of personality that would hack together something pointless like this.
I'm not sure I agree. LLM's have the feel of an alien new technology, and especially did back then. In retrospect, it feels very obvious that small models don't pose much of a threat, but that's only in retrospect.
OpenAI’s transformation—from a nonprofit founded to serve humanity, to a for-profit prioritizing enterprise (B2B) revenue at the expense of everyday users—isn’t simply a shift in business model; it represents a fundamental abandonment of its original mission and of public trust.
Someone should tell the CEO/CTO of Element
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