April is almost gone

This month brought several bittersweet surprises to me.

The first one was that I could see the slow death of Firefox OS on phones.  The marketplace lost two of the most significant apps: Loqui IM and OpenWapp, both which provided a way to  use Whatsapp on the platform.

The second one was the release of pre-release isos of Mageia 6 and OpenMandriva Lx 3.  I must say that both distros are doing a great job; the systems performed so well that they did not seem beta versions to me.

I did not like Plasma 5, though...  I am sure the KDE team is doing a great work, but I truly do not see what the point of this tablet-ready interface is.  After all, KDE missed the tablet train (the Vivaldi tablet never saw the light of the day) and tablets are already in decline...

Last, Yahoo's struggle seemed to have reached my mailbox with its readiness: messages urging me to connect a Hotmail account to my Yahoo account, hotmail-sent messages from my students went to the twilight zone...

Boy... some months do not come gently on us.

On the on and off relationship between FirefoxOS and WhatsApp

Good-bye, ConnectA2! 

Yesterday, my FirefoxOS gave me some bad news: ConnectA2, my chosen app to access the WhatsApp network was discontinued and that I should wait for a new soon-to-be ready app called "ConnectedIM".

ConnectA2 was not a perfect app.  Sometimes it would fail to connect and, after an update, it would constantly receive messages from +server saying "Unable to parse the resource".  This messages were annoying, specially because one could several during a day.  I once got 11 in two hours!

It also lacked certain characteristics from the real WhatsApp which, however, was never a problem for me.  I mean, I was conscious ConnectA2 was NOT WhatsApp.  So, expecting absolute equivalence was foolish.  After all, I was using a FirefoxOS phone, not an android phone.

LoquiIM...very similar to KDE's Kopete

Once that ConnectA2 got seriously broken, I had to remove it and started using LoquiIM.  This app lets one configure accounts on Facebook, Google Hangouts and, of course, WhatsApp.  I only used it to access the WhatsApp network and found it quite efficient.  However, every time WhatsApp released an app update, LoquiIM would fail.  Of course, I was then using a developer phone.  When I got the commercial FirefoxOS phone, LoquiIM was the only app that could access the WhatsApp network.

OpenWapp, show me what you can do

There was another change and LoquiIM started to underperform, so I went back to ConnectA2 for a while... that is, until yesterday.  Since ConnectA2 is no more, I had to decide if I stayed with LoquiIM or if I tried another app: OpenWapp.

 OpenWapp's design is very consistent with the rest of the apps on the FirefoxOS platform (HTML5?), so it feels very natural on the phone.  However, I have noticed that it takes some time to display incoming messages.

For the time being, I will keep using OpenWapp.  Let us see how it goes.  If it performs poorly, I can always go back to LoquiIM or, if they fulfill their promise, I can give ConnectedIM a try.