Initial user experience issues
Hello,
I'm a very new Fractal user coming from a Pinephone (Debian+phosh). I thought I'd share some issues with the initial user experience here so that it might help with the project. I don't mean this to be critical of this project or the software. I sincerely hope that it helps.
Fractal comes pre-installed on the OS images for Deb+phosh so I see it on my home screen. I had no idea what it was for to be honest. When you first launch it on the phone it asks for a server to connect and user/password. But nowhere in the app could I see what kind of server it is meant to connect to, or what it does. Also, no obvious help screen. Google and DuckDuckGo searches don't yield too much that is relevant since the name is too generic. I was actually going to remove it from my phone since I don't like to keep things around that I don't use. It seems that Fractal is installed using Flatpak and the built-in Software app on the phone doesn't know that it is installed. I would need to do some reading on how to uninstall it from the Deb+phosh distribution.
It wasn't until I was reading about Matrix IM and setting up my own private server that I finally came across a list of clients and saw this app in the list. :) Then, I tried connecting to my own homeserver and it works great so far.
I think that Fractal could be a good default matrix client on the Deb+phosh pinephone if there was some kind of a hint on the app screen about what it does. Perhaps even auto-filling matrix.org in the server hostname on the login screen would give me that website where it would become much more obvious what this is.
Or, perhaps if it was branded a little differently like Riot-im or Matrix-im so that people can search for it and figure out what it does. Those other projects have a similar searchability problem too, but tagging "-im" at the end seems to get the hits that you need when searching.
Since Debian+phosh is including Flatpak apps but the Software app doesn't show them, I'll raise that with them. That might also help things a bit if only to get a short description of the app and allow uninstalling from the UI.
Thanks, Chris