Improve the onboarding experience for mobile users

[turt2live]

Background: at least once a week I walk someone through the process of getting connected to our not-matrix.org homeserver to talk with other members. They are mostly iOS users, however most (if not all) of the concerns here translate to android as well.

After the normal process of "Download riot.im, open it up, find the register button" we generally get people to try and sign up on our homeserver. For android this is as easy as giving them a custom link first, however for iOS this is a little harder (element-hq/element-ios#1811).

From there we generally recommend that people don't set up an email address or phone number until later. This is because the verification process blocks the entire sign up process and requires the user to hunt down emails, click links, close tabs, and find apps. It'd be a lot nicer if the verification process happened asynchronously so they can verify their email later (at a desktop, for instance). We're not particularly concerned about people not being able to reset their passwords because they can talk to us and we'll reset it for them.

After the user is finally registered, they are presented with 4 popups (on iOS, I think it's more on Android) about analytics, permissions, etc (we don't have consent enabled on our server). This is fairly invasive and feels like it never ends. The system permission requests are somewhat unavoidable, however it'd be nice if the app didn't request permissions until it needed them (eg: camera).

Now that the user is finally logged in and ready to go, we show them around and get them into the rooms they're looking for. This part is fairly painless and gives us a chance to run through how the app works with them, answering any questions they may have (mostly about our bot's functionality).

For perspective: the vast majority of people we sign up are not tech users in the slightest. Some of the concepts are hard to grasp for these users, so having as little resistance as possible would be a huge benefit. The general feeling is that we shouldn't have to have a guide prepared for people who want to get chatting - it should at most be a couple steps to get them into the chat.

With all that being said, here's the TLDR:

• Our users are not tech people
• Setting up a custom homeserver is hard on iOS (Install app with the custom homeserver/identity server already filled in element-ios#1811)
• We avoid setting up 3pids because verification blocks the signup process (and we can reset their password easily)
• There's a ton of popups before you can even interact with the app after registering

[turt2live]

Automatically linking mobile users to the right homeserver: element-hq/element-web#5930