Have you tried to download with a program that restarts the download from the breakpoint such as Free Download Manager?
Although I can’t remember the exact results, I tried it in other provinces and it was much faster, but it still took about ten minutes, just like downloading from most foreign websites in China. By the way, since F-Droid is also blocked, I have no stable way to get the Android version.
I downloaded it again just now and it took about 3 minutes for each file.
Yes, the browser I use does, but Jami downloads it independently when it updates itself, so I have to manually download it periodically to check for new versions.
The other problem is that nothing happens when you click the Check for updates now button as if it hadn’t been clicked, and if there’s a new version it will tell you after you’ve waited a while. Maybe it runs in the background like auto-check for updates does, but it didn’t successfully notify me when I turned on the auto-check for updates option.
I have finally managed to get Jami to work reliably on Linux Mint 21.3. The only way if found was to install using Snap. The Flatpack installation or the installation from the Jami website will not work, ie it tries to start and then fails. You have to install the Snap version on Linux Mint to do this. I used the following link to install and so far it is rock solid.
Does the download of the official DEB installation file for Linux Mint 21 work from:
Hopefully the Flathub team will resolve the Flatpak issue soon, as the Jami for Flatpak is somehow getting stuck in the Flathub backend:
I am using the latest beta (Build ID: 202503290933, Version: a407fa2c.fc3402940, Eirene) on Windows11 (https://dl.jami.net/windows/beta/jami.beta.x64.msi). It is working very reliably for chat, visioconference and also group calls (in General → Check “(Experimental) Enable call support for groups”).
I also installed it on Zorin OS 17.3 Core (linux, Download - Zorin OS) on a HP EliteBook 830 G6. I installed the beta version (build id: 202503211937) and followed the instructions provided there: Zorin OS — Jami documentation
I can report that it works well on both Win11 and Zorin OS.
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I think that OP’s question, “has anyone actually got Jami to work reliably”, has now been answered “yes”. That’s a useful data point, Jami now works reliably for at least one person. But, the hope is that it works reliably for everyone, not just a few.
I’m still having major problems with it that I haven’t yet been able to deal with, partly because almost all my testing has been with other people and I can’t get them to spend a lot of time helping me to debug. I have two phones but one is running an old Android version, and they can’t talk to each other on Jami, so I might investigate that.
Everything that I see about Jami having to do with DHT’s, swarms, propagating keys around using git between clients, sounds incredibly hacky and unreliable and trying to pursue unrealistic goals. I wonder if the devs could have any appetite for pursuing a re-architecture along more conventional lines.
Jami is clever and interesting and I want to use it because it’s part of GNU, but I would have to call it unusable. Nothing is ever 100% reliable, but 50% or 90% is nowhere near enough.
Sorry to learn about your negative experience with your phone with the old Android version (which version?). On my 8-year old iPhone 8, Jami is working properly (version 3.89 (20250403, running on iOS 16.7.10)). Using it to make video calls with my relatives in Europe (from Canada). Video and sound quality were almost perfect (calling someone with an Android phone and someone with Jami on Windows 10). We are using Jami with the default options. We are using Jami to replace Skype (even if Jami is a lot more than Skype for those caring about privacy).
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The old phone has Android 7 and I also wasn’t able to use it to talk to a family member with a current iPhone (don’t know what version but it is an iPhone 13 so pretty new). Also, of somewhat more personal annoyance, it failed to work with someone who I met online and whose setup I don’t know. On the other hand, it does work with a friend’s Android 14 phone, at least for text and audio (haven’t tried video).
As mentioned, 100% success rate is unattainable, 99% would be great, 98% or maybe 95% would be tolerable given that it’s libre software that’s still in development, but 90% or lower (10% failure) is basically unusable. Right now my success rate is much lower than 50%. The OP had to start a thread here to confirm that for at least some people, the success rate is greater than 0%.
I think as soon as most people hear things like DHT proxy, they give up right away. We need to have an at least optional setup with a conventional client-server organization where the server is easily self-hostable. Text messages might be able to relay between server nodes like irc, and maybe allow voice and video connections to migrate between servers. Relaying voice or video would add too much latency and cost too much bandwidth on multiple servers.
I think I might try setting up a Jitsi Meet server as a hopefully more reliable alternative to Jami for now. I will still hope that Jami gets better. I don’t want to use anything like Skype. What I want the most is reliable communications even if it’s text only. 99.9% reliable text is far preferable to 95% reliable text+voice+video, or say 98% reliable text+voice. I actually don’t care about video very much, but voice is of some importance.
I believe the goal of traditional telephony systems was 99.9999% availability (six 9’s). That meant 1 failed call out of every million made, not that any specific phone worked that solidly. But they went to a lot of trouble to keep those phone switches running and there were almost no system-wide outages. When one happened, it made the TV news.
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Well, it’s not difficult to run Jami for server, just install a Jami instance on the server. As for push notifications and DHT proxies, you should choose the local DHT node mode in almost all cases to turn them off.
I’d been having had a fairly decent, if not reliable, experience with Jami. I had to force stop it on my phone once a week or so to get it to sync, but it worked in general. Until about a month ago, when I stopped receiving or sending messages. I’ve changed the various settings several times, forced stopped it, cleared the cache… everything but uninstalling and reinstalling. I just have a bunch of pending messages. It insists I’m online. Both my desktop and phone are at most recent available versions, and I convinced 4 people to join and we’ve had successful conversations, so it’s not their apps.
If reinstalling doesn’t work, I’m going to have to give up.
Are all of these issues due to DHT? Are there still developers working on this? Do they used it, successfully?
Well, for anyone else getting here, where the Android app has utterly stopped sending or receiving messages, I’ve resolved it on my end at least temporarily.
I first tried backing up the data from the phone, uninstalling & reinstalling, and then restoring from the backup. It appeared to be successful, but it never synced any of the messages, and I couldn’t even send messages to myself via an echo contact I’d set up. Finally, I tried to install and link the devices, but as has been pointed out in another thread, this is currently broken – on mobile, the app always wants to initiate the connection and provide the URL, and it’s impossible to scan a code from mobile. The only way I could get to the scan option was to create a new account on the app and try to connect that way, but although it opened the QR scanner, it refused to scan the QR from my desktop.
Finally, I uninstalled and reinstalled again, but this time exported from the desktop, copied that to the mobile phone, and restored from that. Now everything works again and I can send and receive messages on the mobile app.
The moral of this story is: make sure you have Jami on your desktop (or a second device) and have your devices linked, because if you have only one device and it stops working you will lose access to your account.
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Hehe. As the reply to OP.
In my case there was a hope to use Jami with my friends and family, but..
Suddenly packages for Arch and Flatpak stuck with version 202411xx, and they cannot work with modern Jami network.
Yes, I know Arch pkg and Flatpak are being made by community enthusiasts, however Snap is not an option in my scenario.
Also, latest Jami clients cannot work with JAMS server, which I tried to setup to manage accounts for my aged parents.
Too many “but”, regretfully.
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Hi,
I tested OBS’s window capture and it worked just fine with Jami on ubuntu 24