[JMP-news] Busy Year in 2022

[singpolyma]

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly https://jmp.chat update!

In case it's been a while since you checked out JMP, here's a refresher: JMP 
lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a 
real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else 
that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your 
phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in 
Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

Cheogram Android 2.11.0-1 has been released, including an important fix for 
creating new private group chats.  For some months creating such a group (a 
Jabber group, not a "group text") with Cheogram Android has resulted in a 
public channel on many servers.  Please double-check your private groups and 
change settings if necessary!  This release will also be the first accepted 
into F-Droid with an up-to-date version of libwebrtc, so if you've had any 
issues with calls and use the F-Droid build, we recommend upgrading and 
trying again.  This release also adds support for tagging channels and group 
chats (on supporting servers, such as Snikket), better use of locales to 
determine what country code to prepend when dialling, a new OLED black 
theme, and more.

The data plan (https://jmp.chat/sim) roll out continues, accelerating in 
December but we know there are still many of you waiting.  Thank you so much 
for your patience, and to all the feedback we have received from users so 
far.  We are actively working on making the signup process self-serve so 
that the waitlist will no longer be necessary in the future.

When JMP started we were just one part-time person.  As we grow, the legal 
structures that fit that time no longer do.  This fall we incorporated the 
MBOA Technology Co-operative to house JMP, Togethr, consulting work, and 
other activity.  This gives all our employees full agency in the company and 
gives us a firm legal footing for the future.  Nothing changes for you at 
this time, we're still the same team, and for the time being you don't even 
change the name you write on the cheques, nevertheless it marks a milestone 
in our life as a company.

# Year in Review

This year, JMP and Snikket CIC made a deal to offer Jabber hosting as an 
option for JMP customers. This service is included in the regular JMP 
subscription and will eventually be the default option for new users during 
the sign-up process. JMP customers have been able to participate in a beta 
version of this integration, and JMP customers can contact JMP support to 
set up a Snikket instance directly.

This year also saw international calling added to our list of features. JMP 
users are able to use as many minutes per month as they like, with 
approximately 120 minutes of credit to USA and Canada included by default. 
Customers are able to pay for additional minutes and make international 
calls, although users who are still paying with the old PayPal system 
(https://jmp.chat/paypal-migration) will not have access to these features 
(or other features such as the data plan). We also implemented a 
per-calendar-month overage limit system, where customers can set their own 
limits to avoid unexpected charges. The default limit is currently set at 
$0/month.

One of our most popular features has always been our voicemail and 
transcription, this year we expanded that to support multi-lingual 
transcriptions as well.

We also added multi-account billing this year, an alpha for JMP use from 
Matrix, added two employees, created new bot commands for account 
management, launched Togethr 
(https://blog.jmp.chat/b/togethr-sopranica-social) to help people take 
control of their social media idenity, added support for SMS-only ports 
(https://blog.jmp.chat/b/may-newsletter-2022) and the option to disable 
voicemail, built an XMPP integration for Chatwoot, and launched the JMP data 
plan (https://jmp.chat/sim).

This year saw the launch and rapid development of the Cheogram Android app, 
forked from Conversations and including these and other improvements:

* Add contacts without typing @cheogram.com
* Integrate with the native Android Phone app (optional)
* Address book integration (optional)
* Option to start group texts easily
* Command UI for better interactions with our and other bots (you can even sign up entirely from within the app!)
* Rich text message display (including stickers from Movim users)
* Data de-duplication for files sent/received multiple times
* Message retraction
* Ability to edit tags on contacts and channels
* Tag navigation widget for easier conversation management
* Ability to copy any link in a message to the clipboard
* F-Droid repositories for quick updates of official builds

Blog posts this year included:

* How to use Jabber from SMS: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-jabber-xmpp-from-sms
* Why Bidirectional Gateways Matter: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-bidirectional-gateways
* Computing International Call Rates with a Trie: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-computing-call-rates
* Privacy and Threat Modelling: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-privacy-threat-modelling
* SMS Account Verification: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-sms-account-verification
* Writing a Chat Client from Scratch: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/2022-chat-client-from-scratch

To learn what's happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

* The chatroom (xmpp:discuss at conference.soprani.ca?join) remains the heart of the community.  You can also join from your web browser: https://anonymous.cheogram.com/discuss@conference.soprani.ca or from Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#_bifrost_discuss_conference.soprani.ca:aria-net.org
* The blog (https://blog.jmp.chat), where you may be reading this. Can also be followed in a client like Movim: https://blog.jmp.chat/b/subscribe-using-movim
* The Lemmy Community: https://lemmy.ml/c/sopranica
* The Subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/sopranica
* On Twitter: https://twitter.com/JMP_chat

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!