Horribly Unpolished + Security Concerns – Element Messenger Review

I downloaded this app because of its promise to be a free and open source end-to-end encrypted group messaging app, but have found it to be quite disappointing on a number of fronts. The UI is a mess. Right off the bat there are four (4) navigation tabs: Home, Favourites, People, Rooms. The "Home" tab, however, contains both People and Rooms, rendering those two tabs confusing and redundant. Inside the room itself, there is no easy way to access room settings. Tapping the room's title expands the top bar to display the room's avatar, title, and topic, but no traditiona gear icon to indicate the settings. The user can tap the avatar, title, or topic to edit them, but the tap targets are not well-delineated. The message text inside the rooms does not respect the system font. Unlike the stock messaging app, or other messaging apps I've used, the font Riot uses is by default tiny, and the app offers no setting to change this. Tapping on the most recent message to open up settings moves the encrypted lock icon downward, cutting off at the (random) blank area above the text entry field. The whole action appears sloppy and unrefined. Further, for those security-minded users who sought this app out for the encryption, the app warns you many times that the encryption is still in beta and thus may not be secure. It is commendable that the developer included this pop-up, and hopefully this won't continue to be an issue down the road, but it does render the app somewhat useless, as other unsecure messaging apps do a better job of displaying and managing messages. The privacy policy for the app is also a bit difficult to reconcile with the supposed secure nature of the app. It talks a lot about collection of things inside of chat rooms, (which are supposed to be encrypted), and indeed, after spending time in the app it looks like some things such as changing the topic are not encrypted. (The lock icon that appears next to every message indicating encryption status is unlocked for these messages). This is not secure! Overall, I'm quite disappointed with Riot. Many of the issues I've listed can and hopefully will probably be solved in time as it updates and continues to be polish. The security issues, however, are more troubling. A full-featured, secure messaging app is a necessity in this day and age, and I am really pulling for this app's success, but as of now I cannot recommend it.
Review by vladgaus on Element Messenger.