I have owned an an HTC “G2″ Magic for almost two years and one of my biggest disappointments with the Android operating system has been my inability to find a decent Jabber client. On the desktop, my love of Psi has been going on for half a decade but my encounters with mobile Jabber clients have been nothing but disappointments.

On Android in the past two years I have tried them all, including notables such as Jabbdroid, Beem, Jabiru, Yaxim, Emess and many others not even worth citing. Some of them are hampered by a slow graphical user interface, some deplete batteries in a hurry, some lack features I consider essential, some even crash on receiving a message and not a single one is capable of remaining connected while the radio segment hops from GPRS to UMTS to Wi-Fi and back again… They won’t even try to reconnect – leaving me slack-jawed at the lack of such a basic feature when there is even a standard Android class that notifies applications when network connectivity changes.

Enter Xabber – it does everything I expect from an Android Jabber client. Yes, it really does – you can drop that unbelieving face. I’ll spare you the whole features list… Let’s just focus on what I was looking for :

  • Permanent tray icon as link to contacts lists
  • vCard based avatars
  • XMPP priorities
  • Groups
  • Contacts list management
  • TLS/SSL support
  • Full Unicode support
  • Chat history
  • Parameters for just enough customization
  • Multi User Chat – you can even join multiple rooms
  • Does not deplete the batteries too quickly
  • Reconnects promptly after each disconnection while the radio segment hops from GPRS to UMTS to Wi-Fi and back again

As a bonus it publishes geographical location, but I have no idea where it gets it from, nor if it is supposed to implement XEP-0080.

Don’t you love the feeling of discovering a new application and finding that it behaves the way you expect, as if the developers had been reading your mind and making helpful suggestions about the fuzzy parts of what they had read ? On Android K-9 Mail is the only other example I can think about… Yes, Xabber is that good.

The only downside of Xabber is that the code is not free… The site does not even mention a license. So you don’t know what lies hidden inside, you can’t modify it and you are at the mercy of the developer changing his mind and starting to ask for money for further versions. But even as a Free software fanboy I’m willing to live with that for now – I’m so relieved to at last have something that works.

From now on, expect to find me online while I’m on the move !

Edit 20130130 – Xabber is now Free Software !