

Native modern mobile client uses HTTP based protocol which supports recently added features.Īccording to Mail.Ru Group audited annual report, in December 2013 ICQ had 11 million monthly active users.

Note that all publicly available information in the Internet about ICQ protocol describing legacy binary protocol called OSCAR.

Our custom build system created C-functions which pack/unpack OSCAR messages Ĩ) Huge portion of core code-base was dedicated to create very scalable distributed server architecture Here are some quick facts about ICQ backend infrastructure:ġ) ICQ servers has over 2'700'000 lines of code which is written in C and C++ Ģ) ICQ has its own TCP/IP implementation which works in the user space ģ) Concurrency based on event-driven model (epoll), each instance handles many requests semi-simultaneously Ĥ) About 60 different interconnected internal services ĥ) Each kind of backend service is a cluster of more than a hundred of instances Ħ) C core-code is written in old-school style and I liked that ħ) OSCAR protocol is defined in TCL files. I was enjoyed working with ICQ backend code-base written by AOL (although to be honest not all code was high quality). I started to work at Mail.Ru in 2010, when Mail.Ru bought ICQ from AOL. Don't go all Skype on us ffs.I'm former ICQ backend developer (2010 - 2014). Isn't it enough that people use, and love your platform? Wouldn't making people happy, and being flexible, strengthen your brand just as well if not more than some weak attempt at standardizing trademarks? What platform ever died because of something this ridiculous? People came to Discord because of the flexibility it offered. If you hear it on someones laptop or phone people go "Oh they're using Discord" just like Messengers PING sound. Yeah, I get it, you guys want to be iconic. Oh and quite frankly, the sound is terrible. Bigger IM platforms have fallen than this. All it will do is inspire competition, and don't think it isn't possible. You can't blame people for wanting to use better APIs and then choke them on options. You guys want to make this a nitro feature? Is that it? Go for it. Teamspeak and Ventrilo do this out of the box!.

It's maddening, to know every single IM ever made has this feature and not Discord. I literally miss DMs for hours, notifications from groups for days, because they all sound the same. But this right here, is such a HUGE, HUGE problem, for anyone with many servers, it just dwarfs all that. You can't have them popup into their own window, or make them float. They speak their clients language, and understand what a good UI should look like. They obviously have their ear to the ground and know what people need. There a reason they can't actually acknowledge why this has been a requested feature for so long and they refuse to do it? I used to love their goofy patch notes every version.
