Zulip’s next-gen mobile app, powered by Flutter, released this week

Zulip’s next-generation app for Android and iOS is now our official mobile app! The new app, powered by Flutter, offers a sleek new design and a faster, smoother experience than the old app built on React Native.

Over 2000 users have installed earlier versions of the new app since its public beta release last December. Starting this week, you’ll get the new app the next time your Zulip app is upgraded. If you have your device set to upgrade apps automatically, you’ll get the upgrade the same way as any other new version of the Zulip app.

Background: Zulip is an open-source team chat application designed for seamless remote and hybrid work. With conversations organized by topic, Zulip is ideal for both live and asynchronous communication. Zulip’s 100% open-source software is available as a cloud service or a self-hosted solution, and is used by thousands of organizations around the world.

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

Even if you haven’t been using the old mobile app, I recommend giving the new one a try!

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.

“I am DELIGHTED to see you have kept everything that was good about the old app, and made key improvements. Especially the speed — it is extremely snappy!”

— Gaute Lund, beta app user

You’ll also see that 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 11.0. You’ll stay logged into the same Zulip accounts as before, except accounts that you hadn’t used since 2021, or that you’d already logged out of in the old app (but kept in the accounts list).

Why a brand new app?

We feel that Flutter is a far better platform for building excellent mobile UIs for a complex product like Zulip, compared to the React Native platform we used in the legacy app.

Flutter’s architecture is built for speedy and pixel-perfect apps. We’ve found it has high code quality, excellent documentation, and a robust open-source community that’s impressed us with their handling of bug reports and pull requests. Flutter’s excellent developer experience allows us to implement new features and designs at a pace and quality that would never have been possible with the old codebase.

What about [insert feature here]?

We’re releasing the app now because we are confident that the great majority of Zulip’s users will already find it to be a big improvement over the legacy app. However, we know that some of you will miss particular features that are yet to be built, like channel management and full support for displaying LaTeX formatting.

If that’s you, please let us know! You can:

1. Check on GitHub to see if we’re already tracking your feature request. The milestone marker on the right-hand side of the issue tells you whether we currently consider it a short-term priority.
2. Upvote the issue on GitHub to help us prioritize. You can also post a comment noting why it’s important to you.

If you don’t spot an issue for the feature request or bug you’d like to report, please let us know by starting a new topic in the #mobile channel in the Zulip development community, or emailing feedback@zulip.com. We’ll be working hard to build out the most-requested features in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, you can use the Zulip web app in your mobile browser to access any features you’re missing. If necessary, Android users can uninstall the Flutter app, and download and install the legacy app.

Leave us a review

If you like the new app, please leave a review in the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store. Because the app is brand new, your review will really help others evaluate Zulip.

If you feel the app is missing some functionality you need, we ask that you wait a little while to write your review (and share your feedback directly first). We’re filling in the gaps as fast as we can!

Translating the app

The new app has already been translated into a number of languages, thanks to Zulip’s amazing volunteer translators.

We’d love to get the new app translated into more languages for our user community. There are less than 250 strings to translate — under 7% of the translatable strings in Zulip.

If you’d like to help by translating it into your language, please join Zulip’s translator community on Weblate to get started. If your language isn’t listed yet, use the “+” button at the top to request it. Then 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.

Thanks

Huge thanks to all the users who tried out beta versions of the app and shared their feedback! That’s been a great help for us in prioritizing what to build and ironing out the bugs.

As always, we appreciate all of you who’ve been spreading the word about Zulip. Personal recommendations are a big part of how new users discover our product.

— Greg Price, Zulip mobile lead