Element-android: multiple accounts

[bbigras]

Any plans to support multiple accounts?

Edit by Benoit

The SDK already support multi-account.

Blocked by: https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal/issues/70

Open points:

• [ ] UI/UX
• [ ] What happen in case of soft logout
• [ ] Notifications
• [ ] Logout
• [ ] Login when already connected to another one
• [ ] Create a new account when already connected to another one
• [ ] To be completed

[mguentner]

It would be nice to have this in the reference client from the beginning.

There are a lot of people who have multiple accounts for different roles they fulfill in their lives (i.e. work, private, community, this one software project, the other hardware project etc.) - this calls for a quick way to switch roles during their day.

[thomas-profitt]

I want to voice my support for this too:

Multiple accounts is something that needs to be facilitated early in the architecting of an application.

I currently have work and personal Matrix accounts, and use both miniVector-fdroid and Riot.im-fdroid, respectively, on the same device to facilitate it. It's inefficient because they both need to wake to sync and send notifications independently of one-another, and if I want to configure something for both of them, I have to do it twice.

[bbigras]

In my case I use a work account since I don't want to log in with my personal account at work and allow my employer to see my personal conversations.

At the same time I would like not having to use my phone to ask a question in #matrix:matrix.org

[PhieF]

Yes it would also be really important for me ! :)

[jtagcat]

@PhieF please delete your comment and add a +1 reaction to the original comment.

[laszlovl]

I would like to join the plea for adding multiple account support to riotX from the start, I hope you will consider my perspective worthwhile enough to keep it as a comment instead of a +1.

What's the problem with all messengers that riotX will be competing with, such as Whatsapp and Signal? They only allow for a single account ("identity") and even worse, they force you to tie that identity to a cellphone number making it almost impossible to have two separate identities such as "work" and "personal".

What's an attribute that almost every other communication ecosystem that predates Whatsapp and Matrix has in common? That support for multiple identities is the norm. You won't be able to find an email client where it's impossible to add more than one account. All XMPP clients out there have supported multiple accounts from the start. IRC users are used to having a dozen of different accounts (networks).

Even the vast majority of modern cellphones has support for dual-SIM, because there's a huge demand from users that want to keep their work identity (phone number) separate from their personal one.

Yet unfortunately all reference clients for Matrix currently lack multi-account support. This makes it a dealbreaker for me and many people I know. Supporting this would make Riot/Matrix really stand out from its competitors on a functional level instead of merely an ideological one.

[532910]

Is any update there?
I still remember that it was in a roadmap for riot-android on play.google.com.

[ManDay]

I would like to input my opinion on this matter, although I know that some people will not appreciate it.

I do not oppose multiple accounts as a feature as long as it doesn't get in the way of those who don't use it, but I think it should be much lower on the priority list than certain other features which receive comparitively less attention. I see how it can be useful in many cases, however, for the reasons that I've been told, it seems to be more like a hack around a gone-wrong abuse of Matrix' specification, where instead of one identity in a federation, a user wants to occupy multiple identities simulatenously (NB: I'm neither a Matrix nor a Riot developer and this is solely my interpretation of Matrix and how it should be used). It therefore shouldn't be a "first class citizen" among Riot's features and therefore implemented after Riot is more complete regarding the more essential features.

I'm saying this because I do think that multiple accounts will inevitably have an influence on the UI/UX for everyone (apart from binding development resources, which, however, is none of my business to be interested in), unless, of course, they are implemented such that they effectively behave as if multiple instances of Riot were running separately, one for each account.

That said, I understand the desire to have multiple accounts but I fail to understand its urgency for the reasons that @laszlovl for example has mentioned.

For instance, you are speaking of separating personal and work identities, and given that you seem not to be satisfied by using different Display Names in rooms which are related to work/personal live respectively (which, personally I think is the way to go down), I assume your goal is to entirely conceal your identity to the point where even further inspection (of, say, the MXID, the IP, etc.) would not yield any indication as to "who is who". Meanwhile, you cite IRC as an example where multiple identities exist, yet

• rarely, if ever, have I met someone who uses IRC privately and professionally and both on the same device and is so concerned about people being able to identify them while they are connected from the same device. To be blunt, I would therefore be surprised if your need for this feature in Matrix is actually genuine.
  
  
  
  • Freenode and other networks may provide Cloaks, however and in general, I don't think IRC is designed around anonymity of clients. Even in Matrix, there will be side channels like the read receipt, so you will never get total anonymity and multiple accounts are only obfuscation, so we might as well stay with different display names.
  
  

In my opinion, multiple accounts could be realized simply by parallel instances of Riot and therefore without any effect on UI/UX of single-account instances.

[jtl999]

That said, I understand the desire to have multiple accounts but I fail to understand its urgency for the reasons that @laszlovl for example has mentioned.

For instance, you are speaking of separating personal and work identities, and given that you seem not to be satisfied by using different Display Names in rooms which are related to work/personal live respectively (which, personally I think is the way to go down), I assume your goal is to entirely conceal your identity to the point where even further inspection (of, say, the MXID, the IP, etc.) would not yield any indication as to "who is who". Meanwhile, you cite IRC as an example where multiple identities exist, yet

Many email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, et al) have supported managing multiple email accounts for years. Being able to utilize multiple identities has been a common usecase for this feature. Then again I'm not going to compare common email protocols versus the nuances of the Matrix protocol and potential side channel leakage.

[laszlovl]

For instance, you are speaking of separating personal and work identities, and given that you seem not to be satisfied by using different Display Names in rooms which are related to work/personal live respectively (which, personally I think is the way to go down)

Just a couple of very common usecases for (work vs. personal) email:

• On my business computer I only want to receive work messages, on my private computer only personal messages, on my phone I want to get both
• When I'm on vacation, I want to disable/log out of my work identity so I don't receive any of those messages, but continue to receive personal messages
• My employer wants to set strict limits on my work identity (like forcing message retention, limiting the domains that can be federated with, password/2fa policies, etc) but I don't want these limits on my personal account
• When I quit my job, my employer wants to assume my work address, but I obviously don't want them to be able to touch my personal account
• I want to keep my personal and work identities separate; if someone googles my work address I don't want them to find references to what I did in my own time

All of these are only possible with multiple account support.

multiple accounts could be realized simply by parallel instances of Riot

This isn't possible on Android, and even if it were the UX for that would be much detrimental versus combining multiple accounts in a single interface (like all Email/IRC/XMPP/etc clients do)

[532910]

Shelter can be used as a solutios for those who need one more account right now.
https://github.com/PeterCxy/Shelter
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.typeblog.shelter
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.typeblog.shelter

[bbigras]

There's Island too.

But I need 3 RiotX right now: 1 for work, 1 for personal and one to play with the p2p demo. Life is not fair.

[ralaud]

+1

[pnsbttl]

+1

[trymeouteh]

This is needed badly.

[IntelligentesTierMaulApollo13]

I suppose there is no point in trying to start crowd funding this feature, right? (New Vector recently received 8.5M $ of venture capital)

[ShadowJonathan]

I think the developers' attention and priorities lie somewhere else than this feature, but at least an acknowledgement that its on the backlog (or similar) would be nice, @bmarty

[tgr]

This a crippling omission for anyone who needs to interact with a non-federated Matrix server (e.g. for work) - there will be no official Matrix phone client available for them, basically.

[ptman]

@tgr I'm guessing you mean something by new vector / element with official. But there are other clients. E.g. SchildiChat is a fork of element for android, so you can have two elements at the same time. And there are lots of more android clients: https://matrix.org/clients-matrix . I'm not claiming that it's perfect, but it may help in your situation.

[tgr]

@ptman it's very far from perfect. The official clients some with all kinds of assurances (New Vector is a professional company known to do high-quality work; they will likely be around for support as long as Matrix itself is supported; they stand to lose a lot from security issues; etc) that any random client doesn't. Plus people would have to learn two different clients then.

Elsewhere App Cloner was brought up as an option, that sounds less bad.

[fjrider]

Any plans to support multiple accounts?

Edit by Benoit

The SDK already support multi-account.

Blocked by: matrix-org/sygnal#70

Open points:

* [ ]  UI/UX

* [ ]  What happen in case of soft logout

* [ ]  Notifications

* [ ]  Logout

* [ ]  Login when already connected to another one

* [ ]  Create a new account when already connected to another one

* [ ]  To be completed

Love the app. I would like to see multi user support also!

[uha4]

Beeing able to have multiple accounts for different purposes is one of my main reason i wanted to switch to matrix and promote it among my friends. This was the reason why i considered matrix better in privacy than e.g. Signal for my usecases.
It is quite disappointing to learn that this is not supported out of the box by most standard clients.

[Xyz00777]

What's the state of these feature request? Its one of the oldest request... (im not a programmer) but it cant be so difficult... or?

[trymeouteh]

Beeing able to have multiple accounts for different purposes is one of my main reason i wanted to switch to matrix and promote it among my friends. This was the reason why i considered matrix better in privacy than e.g. Signal for my usecases.
It is quite disappointing to learn that this is not supported out of the box by most standard clients.

Once this feature is available, I do think Matrix will explode.

[ShadowJonathan]

Once this feature is available, I do think Matrix will explode.

I don't think its necessarily a killer feature, but it's definitely requested from a user-base of power users who'd want to switch between work and personal accounts (and the like)

I think https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/915 is more related to this, with it's prospect that it enables users to give less thought to where they sign up in the first place, and being able to move their accounts' "home" wherever they like at any time, which gives them more freedom.

[JokerGermany]

Because of the bad ios support for xmpp I was thinking of changing to matrix. Still no support for mulitple Accounts oO

I am really glad that i decided to use xmpp a couple of years ago because this feature was missing...

[btittelbach]

I think matrix-org/matrix-doc#915 is more related to this, with it's prospect that it enables users to give less thought to where they sign up in the first place, and being able to move their accounts' "home" wherever they like at any time, which gives them more freedom.

I don't see how this would solve the problem of needing to interface with several accounts in parallel.

The fact that we don't have UI support for this, is currently preventing me from introducing Matrix into our company, since people don't want to give up their personal accounts _and_ don't want to user their private identiy for work.

[nkosi23]

It would be great to have official feedback on the roadmap and/or timeline for this feature, at least so we know whether or not we can expect it soon.

[SimonBrandner]

I believe this is planned

[nkosi23]

To add to the discussion, once thing that hasn't been mentioned/noticed so far is that this feature would likely open up a powerful revenue platform for the project. From what I gather, Element is making money by having users create an account on a premium EMS homeserver. However with the current situation, this is a hit-or-miss: if the user creates an account on a different homeserver the first time he installs Element, the lifetime value of this customer is radically reduced. It will be very difficult to have the individual switch.

However, with multi-account support, Element would be in a position to convince users to create a premium account (as an extra account) any time. EMS accounts, could even include features allowing people to manage multi-accounts more easily (ability to backup conversations from other homeservers, advanced integration of this scenario with their bots and bridges etc... - for example if someone sends you a file on a customer homeserver account, you can easily forward it to a bot on your EMS account to have some cool processing happen etc...).