• WebMessenger
Another offering in the field of multi-protocol IM clients for the iPhone: Callwave’s WebMessenger. This one skews slightly corporate, with support for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Skype, Google Talk, Jabber, and Reuters networks. That all sounds great, but there’s good reason for the app’s current 1.5-star rating.
WebMessenger requires an account with Callwave before any of the IM services can be used. They got my confirmation email to me quickly after I signed up, but I don’t see any good reason to put me through this unless they’re doing some kind of undocumented proxying. Once I was signed into their service, I was asked to set up an IM account. I picked Jabber, naturally, but not before having to restart the app twice to get it to offer me a choice of services.
After all of that, I was asked to import my “Buddy List” (an AOL trademark, by the way). I have no idea what this button was supposed to do, but my roster never loaded, and I wasn’t able to test the chat functionality. When I attempted to test with a second XMPP account to be sure it wasn’t something on my server, I discovered that only one Jabber account is allowed. This is where I gave up.
“WebMessenger” is a great name for this app, since it has nothing to do with the Web, and doesn’t function as a messenger. I expect more from a 1.0 release, especially when two functional XMPP clients have already been released on the App Store. WebMessenger may be free, but isn’t worth the headache.