One other thing that might be worth considering is data usage. Since messages are padded to 16KiB and all SMP channels are 1:1, sending a message to multiple users can start to use a lot of data. Imagine a group chat with 10 users, each with four devices. Sending a single message in this room would use 639 KB of data, assuming the message is sent to every device of every user, except the sender device. Sending four messages brings this to 2.5MB.

I don't think this scenario is much of an edge case, especially considering that it's easy for old devices to accumulate (see: matrix), and 10 people isn't an unreasonable group chat size. But 2.5MB is also a lot of data for four short messages (e.g. "got the address", "im omw", "cya in 10m", "<3"), especially if you're on a metered connection or have poor signal, which many mobile users are likely to be.

I'm not really sure what the solution to this is, but I think it should be at least a consideration.

This is related to issues #1515 and (to an extent) #1821, but how the issue of multiple devices is resolved has the potential to dramatically exacerbate those issues, so I think it's worth bringing up here as well.

(footnote: I might be misunderstanding the SMP protocol and how SimpleX handles groups on top of that — please correct me if I've misunderstood)

Uh oh!

Multi-device synchronization #444

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