Mobile technology evolved very quickly but XMPP did not. I remember using Pidgin to chat on Google Talk. Then Google decided (rightly) that more secure auth was needed, and implemented an XEP to add OIDC authentication. Now third-party clients had to decide whether they wanted to implement Google's auth, or not. Ultimately it is easier to control the protocol and the app--and along with those, the tracking, the display of ads, the feature set, and so on.
I mean, does E-mail need new features? I’d argue that it is successful and ubiquitous because it doesn’t change and have a half dozen companies breaking compatibility by trying to out-feature each other. Th Internet could use more applications like E-mail and fewer like the chat mess we have.
Chat should be the deadest-simplest protocol/app on the planet. It’s sending text… That’s pretty much the first thing a developer learns how to do when they learn network programming. We should be able to send text from one computer to another in a way that is compatible no matter what company’s client you use. Yet nothing has managed to gain traction.
Well, it got html and rtf and attachments bodged into it, and never got encryption working.
And it's plagued with spam and attacks and fakes.
Chat is sending text, and files, and encryption, and now doing all that to groups of people, which means you need group managers and permissions, and authentication of those users. Might as well add video and audio calls now you have an address book, as phone companies can't do that properly it seems
