It'd be great if there were usable non-Riot clients that fully supported end to end cryptography. At this point Signal has better alternative clients in Pyre.chat and Signal-Weechat than Matrix has, as the existing alternative clients are almost all MVPs missing major features like e2e.
The lack of a simple, common library is a real sticking point. Each client & bot shouldn't have to implement the baseline network protocol and then build e2e atop it, rather the clients should be focused on what to do with the messages after receiving them, how to display them, etc.
I say this as a daily non-Matrix.org user of Riot, the functionality of the Riot ecosystem on its own is good, but I'd be hard pressed to port my own Signal bots to Matrix, let alone build a featureful client in a performant toolkit (eg: Not Electron) for Matrix today.
There isn't a viable ecosystem outside Riot/Synapse currently, which makes it feel like Matrix is just a self-hosted Slack/Hipchat solution with just Riot as usable clients. IMO there needs to be diversity in the Matrix ecosystem just like the Fediverse has with Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, PixelFed, NextCloud, Rustodon, etc all inter-operating in a sane, functional manner.
So, other clients with fully working E2E encryption include: Seaglass, Weechat, Pattle and nheko (although it needs to implement attachments, but they is easy). The weechat and nheko implementations are independent implementations (ie not the same as the Riot ones).
We are starting work this week on closing the E2E gap for all the rest.
I don't think Pattle has e2ee support, from what I can see on my phone. While it is built on the Matrix Android SDK which has e2ee support, the app itself doesn't seem to use that support yet.
The lack of a simple, common library is a real sticking point. Each client & bot shouldn't have to implement the baseline network protocol and then build e2e atop it, rather the clients should be focused on what to do with the messages after receiving them, how to display them, etc.
I say this as a daily non-Matrix.org user of Riot, the functionality of the Riot ecosystem on its own is good, but I'd be hard pressed to port my own Signal bots to Matrix, let alone build a featureful client in a performant toolkit (eg: Not Electron) for Matrix today.
There isn't a viable ecosystem outside Riot/Synapse currently, which makes it feel like Matrix is just a self-hosted Slack/Hipchat solution with just Riot as usable clients. IMO there needs to be diversity in the Matrix ecosystem just like the Fediverse has with Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, PixelFed, NextCloud, Rustodon, etc all inter-operating in a sane, functional manner.