I started using Conversations in 2014 when I needed something that worked well over very low quality connections in the back country. XMPP gets a bad rep for this, but it's undeserved and most of the issues it had in the early 2000's have been fixed. I ended up hacking on Conversations a lot and have been using it ever sense (even when I'm in town and have LTE). The UI is nice, it supports lots of different services or I can run my own server, and it uses a standardized protocol instead of reinventing the wheel yet again.