Android IRC clients

I recently went looking for an IRC client for my Nexus One and couldn’t find any good information to narrow the field based on some quick google searches. So I downloaded 4 from the market to give them a try. Since others may also be looking for this sort of info I figured I’d share my impressions. If you are a developer of any of these apps, first thank you for making them free, I’m obviously a fan of free software. Second if I got anything wrong about your app, please ping me and I’ll update this post.

Yaaic

Yaaic doesn’t seem to explicitly support password protected channels, but you can work around this by running /join commands on connect. One downside of this is there doesn’t seem to be a way to edit or delete commands that are run on connect, which can be problematic for channels that rotate passwords. You switch channels by swiping left or right which is feels natural except for it being very sensitive. I keep swiping past channels in the middle, though this might be good if you have a lot of channels and don’t want to have to do multiple swipes to get between them. Couldn’t find any options for notifications. If fact the only options I can find beyond the server’s settings are 5 booleans: reconnect, show icons, show colors, show timestamps and 24 hour format (which is greyed out).

fIRC

Unfortunately it doesn’t support SSL connections. This is really a non starter for me

AndChat

Multiple channels are supported by tabs at the top (or maybe they’re buttons). Supports highlighting with customizable notifications. You can highlight any mention of your usual nick (ie. blassey even though you may be logged in as blassey_ or lassey). The notifications are noticeable, but not annoying and also show you what was said in a marque. It has an option to keep chat logs, thought I don’t know that IRC logs are the best use of my phone’s memory. Same thing as Yaaic for channels with passwords, except you can edit the commands. AndChat has an option for join/part/quit message hiding, which is obviously nice as it unclutters your relatively small screen (especially in popular channels).

Android IRC Free

Has a nag screen on launch asking you to buy the full version which lasts for 10 seconds. I haven’t used this one nearly as much as the others because often I’m hopping on IRC from my phone to make a quick comment to someone. The 10s lag is incredibly annoying in this situation. And I don’t really see much in this app that justifies paying for it given the other free options. It does support notifications though, very much like AndChat.

And the winner…

For me it’s AndChat, at least for now. This is based on personal taste, and use cases but AndChat seems to offer a lot of options that make IRC on a mobile phone work best for me. Now a feature wish list:

• A disconnected state/proxy mode. I’m concerned that having an IRC client running all the time will drain my battery. It would be awesome if a mobile client could work with ZNC or another proxy to just ping me (perhaps with an intercepted SMS) when I get pinged in a channel and otherwise live disconnected.
• Tab completion. My default keyboard doesn’t have a tab key, but I want to do tab completion for nicks and commands.