Try Zulip’s next-gen mobile app, powered by Flutter

Starting today, we hope many of you who use Zulip on mobile will try switching over to the new app and let us know what you think. You can join the beta

• for iOS here,
• or for Android here on your device or here on the web.

This beta installs separately from the existing Zulip mobile app, so you can have both coexist on your device. (It’s also independent of whether you’re in the beta for the main app.) The new app will roll out to all users when it’s ready to exit beta, which we plan for early next year.

(If you’re not a current Zulip user and want to try the app out, you can create an account in the Zulip development community or another open community.)

The new app: faster, fresh design, full multi-account

The Zulip core team has for months now been using the new app almost exclusively, and it’s a major upgrade from the old Zulip app. Personally, I find I use it far more than I ever wanted to use Zulip on mobile before, even though the new app doesn’t yet support all of Zulip’s features.

Most of all, the new app is much faster and more responsive than the old app (though for the largest organizations with 10K+ users, the initial connection can still take several seconds). For a quick demo, try opening a busy channel or your “Combined feed”, and scrolling back through history. You’ll find that the new app can go through thousands of messages smoothly, without a hiccup. If your network connection to the server is good, you should never even reach the top before it loads the next batch of older messages.

As one community member put it in July:

wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww !! 👏

I tried it a bit, but how cool and how fast, this is called speed, I’m very happy that this choice was made, I hope to see it officially in the store soon

Part of this is because the new app is built on Flutter, an open-source UI framework designed for speedy and pixel-perfect apps. We’ve been very happy with our experience switching from React Native to Flutter, thanks to its high code quality, excellent documentation, and a robust open-source community that’s impressed us with their handling of bug reports and pull requests. We’ll tell that story in more detail in a future blog post next year; in short, we feel Flutter is a far better platform for building excellent mobile UIs for a complex product like Zulip.

You’ll also see the app has a fresh new design, matching the changes we’ve made in the Zulip web and desktop apps in recent years:

And it brings full multi-account support: the new app stays connected to all your Zulip servers at the same time, so you can switch between them instantly without waiting for data to load.

The new app fully supports all Zulip Server versions since 7.0 (May 2023), including the upcoming 10.0, and handles almost all of Zulip’s message-formatting features. For a few formatting features including LaTeX math, messages are readable but not yet rendered in their full glory.

Translating the app

The new app has just begun to be translated, so with a few exceptions you’ll find the beta’s UI is entirely in English. If you’d like to help make sure the app is fully translated for your language when it launches, we’d be glad for your contributions!

To get started, please join Zulip’s translator community on Weblate, and take a look at our translator documentation. (That doc hasn’t yet been updated for Zulip’s in-progress move from Transifex to Weblate as our translation platform, but the rest of the information there remains valid.) About 150 of the new app’s strings are already in Weblate and ready to be translated, and over the coming weeks we’ll be sweeping through to set up the rest for translation too.