I didn't say developers "gave up", but even as of 2019 it didn't seem like things were moving forward in any meaningful way.
Even just for OMEMO support, we all had to compile a plugin for libpurple/Pidgin, and it didn't even have full UI support so was very difficult to use when things didn't work automatically.
We used a gajim but iirc, to get OMEMO support we had to compile that too.
But I'm truly glad to hear the ecosystem has improved - I would have much preferred to have stuck with XMPP. But in 2019/2020, Matrix offered all this and more and worked very well. It was impossible to make the case for us to stay on XMPP.
Even just for OMEMO support, we all had to compile a plugin for libpurple/Pidgin, and it didn't even have full UI support so was very difficult to use when things didn't work automatically.
We used a gajim but iirc, to get OMEMO support we had to compile that too.
But I'm truly glad to hear the ecosystem has improved - I would have much preferred to have stuck with XMPP. But in 2019/2020, Matrix offered all this and more and worked very well. It was impossible to make the case for us to stay on XMPP.