At The Matrix Conference 2025, I had the opportunity to reveal the evolution and journey to our flagship apps: Element X and Element Pro.
Watch the whole presentation
A big bet; building Element X
A couple of years ago, we made a bold decision; to rebuild our mobile apps from scratch. The goal was to move our apps (aka frontend clients) to a common technical ground based on a Rust SDK. It was a strategic shift to reduce long-term maintenance and development overhead, but also delivering a more platform-native and modern user experience.
Anyone who has worked on a similar project knows it is hard to overstate the challenge. A one-to-one rewrite alone is difficult; user expectations are shaped by existing feature sets and behaviours. The Matrix ecosystem was at the same time evolving with large and breaking updates - including Sliding Sync, native OIDC and Matrix RTC - that were not ready at the time but needed to be included and shape what “complete” would look like.
The Rust SDK itself was also incomplete when we started, so much of our effort had to go into building its functionality - and ended up being more complex than the work within the app.
Today, the Rust SDK foundation is used by many other clients — so this journey made a significant impact beyond Element X itself.
The path to one app; migrating to Element X
Ideally, we would have finished Element X, and replaced the existing legacy apps in the app stores. But achieving feature parity took longer than expected due to the complexities mentioned above. So just over a year ago, we launched Element X, excellent but incomplete, so users could benefit from its speed and modern experience. We kept the legacy apps available to ensure a smooth, stress-free transition for those that were using features that were not available yet.
As part of this shift, you may have noticed a change in the app stores. The legacy client has been renamed “Element Classic”; something we announced and set live during my talk at The Matrix Conference. This hopefully helps new users starting with Element X, while reassuring existing users that nothing is disappearing overnight.
And now, the exciting part - we’re not far away from bringing everyone fully over to Element X! We have made good progress on Spaces and Threads (details below) and soon Element X will have parity with the Element Classic app. In addition to that, we want to simplify the device verification when people sign in to Element X and have an Element Classic app running already on the same phone. After that we will actively start to invite people over to Element X; and the sunset date for the Element Classic app will be announced.
Threads and Spaces 2.0!
This year’s focus has been on bringing Spaces and Threads to Element X; both being blockers preventing active user migration, as many are dependent on these particular features.
The functionality of Threads wasn’t converted straight to Element X as we aimed for a better experience; developing Threads 2.0 - similar to the Discord or Slack experience - where users automatically or manually can receive notifications for Threads of interest that they’re subscribed to. While we’re working on next generation Threads, Element X already allows reading and writing in Threads if you enable it in the Labs section of the app.
Spaces was similarly redesigned specifically for Element X to better support the workplace use case in the public sector and also enterprises. The first “read-only” increment version allows viewing of joined Spaces, seeing rooms and accepting invitations. Future iterations will allow creating and managing rooms, and grouping rooms in your room list by Spaces. See what’s to come in the demo with Aaron Thornburgh.
Aaron demos Spaces
We’re introducing a richer, more intuitive workspace experience built around Spaces and organisational structure. Soon, users will be able to clearly distinguish internal and external Spaces at a glance, browse and request access to shared Spaces, and confidently preview private Space invites before joining.
Navigation will get smarter, with filters to quickly surface unread activity, rooms, Spaces and invites. Creating rooms and Spaces becomes more flexible too; rooms can be placed directly into a Space during creation, or kept “spaceless” for general chat. Admins will gain clearer tools for managing membership, permissions and privacy across both organisations and spaces.
Element Pro; built for the workplace
Now, here’s another big update!
We’ve launched Element Pro; our new workplace client built on Element X. Available on both mobile and desktop, it complements our Pro family (Synapse Pro and Element Server Suite Pro backend) with experience and features that are purely user-facing or require both the frontend and the backend component. Together they create a complete workplace solution for organisations deploying Element professionally.
The Pro family is designed for workplace environments where needs are different from everyday consumer or community messaging. It isn’t just about end-user experience in messaging and collaboration — it also supports the teams who deploy, operate and manage the service. More specifically, the Pro family focuses on solving core challenges around identity management, security, compliance, infrastructure and scaling.
Key capabilities include richer support for Single Sign-On (SSO), centralised administration, content scanning, auditability, and enterprise-grade Service Level Agreements (SLAs). We’re still early in the journey when it comes to workplace end-user apps, but we released the apps now to ensure organisations can start in the right place — with some core features already available and more arriving rapidly.
A fully-branded app - demoed live
Self-branded apps are an additional capability of Element Pro. It allows customers to deploy white-labeled Element Pro apps with custom names, logos and brand colours in the app stores. The apps are built by Element (thus no need to fork, or set up build pipelines) and the end-user organisation can distribute them under their own App Store and Play Store accounts.
At the conference, Doug Earnshaw, our Senior Software Engineer, demonstrated this live by spinning up his own fully branded app; StrasChat.
Doug showcases white-labeled Element Pro apps
Next steps
We are committed to rolling out these updates in the coming months. We will publish detailed updates on Element X migration, and sunsetting the Element Classic app as we go and build tooling as necessary to help everyone seamlessly migrate to Element X. This includes supporting end users as well as Admins and IT and security.
Thank you to the community, customers and partners for feedback and collaboration — you’ve helped shape the priorities behind these releases. If you’d like to dive deeper, watch the full session above.
