Jami

Conclusions

Testing Jami left me with some reservations. Text chats work reliably, but quickly become confusing if you communicate with many people who do not have a Jami account and therefore do not have a username. In the sidebar, there are many chats that only show the contact's ID as a distinguishing criterion. The developers urgently need to improve this, a suggestion has already been posted to the project's bug tracker [6].

When sending messages, problems repeatedly occurred in hands-on tests. Jami delivered text messages reliably, even to accounts that were used on several devices (such as on a PC and a smartphone) at the same time. Pictures or documents sent via Jami's encrypted network often got stuck. The client then reported Initialize File Transfer, but nothing happened at the recipient's end.

Jami was impressive in video chats with two or more participants. It is one of the few messengers in the package sources of common distributions that support videoconferencing without the need to register with a service. You will definitely want to give the program a chance and experience it for yourself.

Jami Today

What is now Jami used to go by the name of SFLphone and then later on Ring. Originally the program was intended as a plain vanilla softphone for SIP providers. The function still exists, even though the messenger functions are now the main focus. The current "Free as in Freedom" version now offers cross-platform videoconferencing (until now, this function was only available in the Linux version), audio and video messaging in the style of WhatsApp, and a dark theme. In addition, Jami now allows users to broadcast their own desktop or individual windows instead of a webcam image.

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