This post title may confuse my readers of Greek origin, as there are at least three meanings that pop up in mind when trying to make sense of the title word. Notice that most will read ‘J’ as in ‘Jason’.
The first is ‘glass’, if you put an emphasis in the ‘a’ vowel.
If you put emphasis on the ‘i’, there are two more, a children’s game for the yard, and the word for ‘mosque’.
Now, another meaning should be considered. The new instant messenger – video communicator service (and app) Jami. It is now very usable, with new features added recently and getting mature in the time of quarantine, where the need for communication is great.
You will think that there are already a lot of mature and free to use apps out there, and why you should care for another one. Well this one is really free (it is an official GNU project), community driven and secure. On top of that, it uses the edge of technology in voice and video compression, so it uses a small amount of data and is reliable for your mobile phone, it keeps good quality even when there is a little signal and bandwidth to go by.
The most prominent thing is that you own your data. Your communication data is shared only with the participants. There is no central server, the server is the caller’s device. There are a lot of features, I will not list them here, check for yourselves. I will say it is good for personal communications and group calls as well, with screen share!
My experience with it is still small but I use it often in Android and OpenSuse Leap 15.2. I have not made any long distance calls to see if there is much latency so far. On Android there is no problem that I encountered, it is just great. On Leap 15.2, I run it along Zoom and sometimes I noticed that Jami delays to release the usb webcam. If you close Jami and start another app, say Kamerka, Kamerka does not find the webcam. You need to unplug and replug the camera in order to work. But it is not a constant behaviour, sometimes all worked well. Maybe it is a usblib thing, haven’t figured it out yet.
Edit: The above behavior is not related with Jami. It is a webcam issue. Other apps that use the camera showed similar behavior as Jami. Then I used my older webcam and all was great again.
Overall I like it very much, I suggest you give it a try and see for yourselves. It is not an old app, it is refreshed constantly at the moment, so you may encounter a bug, but it is very usable and stable as per my observations.
Have fun.
