Open-Xchange is pleased to announce the Beta (not for production use) release of OX COI Messenger App for Android.
Open-Xchange is leading the fight to bring back freedom of choice to users and developers by driving the creation of the COI standard. In a world where chat communication is held in monopolized silos, the COI standard aims to open up the market so that anyone can create, or distribute, open chat applications. This will benefit end users, developers and providers alike.
What is COI?
COI (Chat Over IMAP) is a new and open protocol, developed by Open-Xchange, which utilizes existing email servers to deliver chat-based communications.
The main advantage is that any COI compliant app can communicate with any other COI compliant app, or email client.
Any chat app that has been written using the COI protocol simply connects to an email server and uses an email address to direct the chat data. If the recipient has a COI based client (any COI client works) they see the message in their messaging app. If the recipient does not have a COI client, they will see the chat as an email.
You will find further information, benefits for customer, developers and consumer under: https://www.open-xchange.com/portfolio/coi and https://www.coi-dev.org
What is the OX COI Messenger App?
In a mobile first world, with a growing number of devices per user, service providers are under increasing pressure to offer customers email services across a wide range of devices. OX COI Messenger provides fast and robust chat-based communications on both Android and iOS. Please note, OX COI Messenger App for iOS (Beta) will be delivered later this month.
It provides the following:
- Available Android on both mobile and tablet devices (iOS follows later).
- Quick and easy onboarding.
- Chat-based communications via any email (IMAP and SMTP) servers using the new COI protocol
- Import device contacts from your device – Re-importing your contacts will not create duplicates
- Add new contacts dialog – either manually or by simply scanning a QR code
- Create and manage groups
- Upload voice recordings, images, videos, PDFs or any other file to the chats
- Choose what type of messages you want to process – only chat messages, messages from your contacts or both chat and normal email messages
- Advanced contact search – also with autocomplete function
- Read receipts
- End-to-end encryption - messages are end-to-end encrypting using the Autocrypt.org PGP standard
- Transfer your encryption key either manually or with an Autocrypt Setup message
- Block and unblock contacts
More information about the Beta program (not for production use), COI Developer Page, COI News Page can be found here:
Attention: As with most Beta software the use of the OX COI Messenger App for Android is not to be used in any production environments.