Florian Schmaus Application 2022

My name is Florian Schmaus (xmpp/mail: flo@geekplace.eu) and I am reapplying for XSF membership.

About Me
I'm a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. A few years ago I stumbled over an Android app called TalkMyPhone. It took a modified version of Smack to run on Android and basically allowed one to remotely interact with the Android API over XMPP messages. It also would send notifications triggered by certain events on the Android device as XMPP message. The app was later renamed to GTalkSMS for Android 2.2 and I became a main contributor and later developer for it.

At that time, Rene wrote aSmack, a build environment to port Smack to Android. After he lost interested in aSmack, I took over maintaining it and replaced the modified Smack version in GTalkSMS with aSmack. It soon turned out that aSmack was hard to maintain. So I start to modularize the parts of Smack that use Java API that isn't available on Android, so that they can be replaced by others.

I also heavily contributed to Smack and eventually became the maintainer of Smack too.

Now, after years of hard work on Smack (remember I do this in my spare time), Smack 4.1 is able to run on Android and on a standard Java SE runtime. Hurray :)

In 2013 I decided to rewrite something like GTalkSMS from scratch using a modular approach. The project is called MAXS aka. the Modular Android XMPP Suite.

I am one of the authors of XEP-0373: OpenPGP for XMPP, which hopefully will replace the flawed predecessor.

The main item on my agenda is Instant Stream Resumption.

While there are many things in XMPP land that needs fixing, I believe this is one of the most important ones. I already talked about XMPPs long reconnection time in my 2015 FOSDEM talk. To address this I started to work on a solution in 2016. The outcome is XEP-ISR and the Internet Draft for the Hashed Token SASL mechanism.