How To Manage All of Your Instant Messaging On Android

All-in-one instant messaging app Trillian has been a huge favourite over a period of many, many years. Unfortunately, the same could not be said about its Android counterpart. Despite having a majority of the features ported from its desktop counterpart, the app’s price was a big, big deterrent to most Android users. All that recently changed, however, when Trillian made its app available for free in the Android market. We at TheDailyBuggle were quick to jump on it and take it out for a spin. Here’s what we gained from our first impression.

Simple. Clean. Minimal

The app has been designed quite thoughtfully and seems to bank upon the trifecta of mobile apps. It’s clean and unobtrusive. Most actions don’t take more than a couple of taps on the screen, and even the advanced settings don’t go deeper than two screens on most occasions. You can see for yourself as we take you through the tour.

As always, the first thing to be done is the installation itself. Head over to the Android Market and install Trillian from there.

Once you fire up the app, you’ll be asked to sign up for a Trillian Astra account. This account will act as a placeholder for managing all your other accounts. Consider this as your passport to multi-instant messaging fun on your Android. Once the setup is complete, it will take you to the main screen of the app.

This is where you configure your instant messaging accounts. Just click on Menu > Add Account. You will be directed to a screen from where you can select the network you want to add and provide the credentials for it. As you can see from the screenshots below, it lets you add a multitude of instant messaging providers, ranging from AIM to Jabber. If you are sick and tired of the chat support in the Facebook Android app, you’d be relieved to find that Trillian supports Facebook as well.

Once you’ve added your contacts, you can head back to your main screen, where you’ll see a list of all your online contacts. Tap on any one of them to start a conversation with that person.

The Trillian app also lets you set a common status message across all your networks. To do that, just hit Menu > More > Set Status, and type in a status text for yourself in the screen that shows up.

If you are a crazy socialite, you’ll really appreciate the search functionality built into the app. Hitting Menu > Search takes you to a dedicated Search screen from where you can search across all your networks. Results are almost real-time, making it that much better.

The Settings screen (Menu > Settings) has some advanced settings that you may or may not want to tweak. Frankly speaking, you should be able to do just fine with the default settings, unless you really love digging into your app (like I do!).

Caveats

The only problem I faced while working this app was that I couldn’t get access to my Google Talk account. I am not too sure but this was probably not due to any problem with the app itself, but because of the two-factor authentication that I’ve enabled for my Google account. In fact, I could sign in perfectly fine with another Google account that I have that doesn’t have two-factor authentication on it. Nevertheless, this will probably be on the to-do list for the app’s developers.

As someone who uses instant messaging on Android quite regularly, I’ve come to love the Trillian app. More often than not, the Google Talk app (a default on most Androids) doesn’t cut it for me, and I really don’t want to go about installing a different app for all the networks that I am on. Trillian for Android provides me with perfect middle path and I’ve been enjoying it thus far. Let us know how your experience turns out in the comments.