Add ability to join public calls without an account

[enoch85]

To get a wider spread of Talk, and enhance the usability it would be nice to somehow generate automatic guest accounts that users could use with Talk.

So for example, if I choose a contact from the telephones contacts (full contact book) a link would be generated that automatically creates a guest user that are valid for let's say 1 hour.

That way anyone with Nextcloud and Talk installed could use Talk for private chats or video calls - not depending if they have Talk or not.

Maybe my idea isn't so thought through, but I would really like to make it easier for anyone using Talk without the need for a Nextcloud Server. I know that we have public conversations, but it would be nice to invite anyone using a guest account so that the external user could get the full benefit of using Talk on their Phone as well.

Maybe send something automatically generated per SMS like:

Hey! [Full Name] wants to talk to you on Nextcloud Talk. Download the app from Play here: [Link]
Your temporary credentials are:

Username:
Password: 

The credentials are valid for 1 hour.

The server address is: [Address of the senders server based on what's used for Talk in their config]

My proposal would need some work on the server side as well I guess.

[enoch85]

Or even better, when you access a public link from a smartphone, detect that it's a smartphone and ask the user to download Talk. Then when Talk is installed, use the public link as a login somehow.

Not so thought through, but yeah I hope it's possible somehow.

[enoch85]

The point being: I don't want to manually create users on my server to be able to use Talk for Android with external contacts that doesn't use Nextcloud.

[mario]

How about I make it possible to join a public conversation without an account from the app?

[enoch85]

You nailed it, as usual! :)

[enoch85]

...if you mean that it would be possible to use the app without an account, just a public link?

[enoch85]

So basically two options when you start the app for the first time:

1. Login
2. Use public link

[mario]

Yup, that's it.

[enoch85]

Super!

[escoand]

Any progress so far? Using public links is already working (when logged in) so is it a bigger problem?

[mario]

No progress I'm afraid @escoand - just busy with other things! Feel free to contribute though, we'd all appreciate it! :)

[Art4]

This feature would make it possible to use Nextcloud Talk as a privacy friendly news room for school classes or events. One could create a conversation with link and tell the parents/participants to install the Nextcloud Talk app. They could join the conversation without the need for an account. That could be a serious alternative instead of using WhatsApp for this purposes.