Element for Android doesn't support searching in encrypted channels and I think you can't use E2EE in the browser at all(?), plus basically every other client has even more drawbacks when it comes to E2EE.
My team recently tried RocketChat, but E2EE is obviously an afterthought for that project as it has even more limitations than non-Element Matrix clients (no searching, no pinning, no file upload, no edit, etc.). Plus Jitsi integration seems to be buggy right now (at least on my Windows installation).
What else is out there that's not on my radar? Is Matrix with Element really the best option right now? Is there no project that puts E2EE above all else?
First of all Jitsi isn't part of the rocketchat-server package, so you need to set it up yourself or use a hoster, which both require separate accounts from the RocketChat ones.
The specific issue I had on Windows was that RocketChat wasn't registered to handle jitsi-meet:// links, it would just open a blank "open with" Windows dialog everytime. In general the "integration" seems lacking, the whole UX is really bad compared to Matrix/Element where voice calls just work.
Oh, nice! I can make a video later on how it looks on my machine. I even tried fiddling with the registry to force them to be opened with RocketChat, but that didn't work either.
I've made some screenshots instead of a video. I hope you still get what the issue is.
At the end there is no usuable call from the RocketChat client. But I can copy the meet.jit.si URL and open it in a browser.
Originally I had an error message telling me that Windows doesn't know what to do with jitsi-meet:// links, but that doesn't show up anymore for some reason. Maybe because of me messing with the registry to solve the issue, but I've actually removed the registry key I had created before.
Ah I had that popup confused with one of our own; Now that I checked the text on google translate I figured out what's happening.
The meet.jit.si domain is a public jitsi instance that is kept by jitsi themselves. They recently implemented this login requirement on that domain (one user in every meeting must authenticate); They probably assumed that those meetings would always be in a browser and our desktop app is not handling that authentication flow properly. I'll register a task for someone from our app's team to take a look.
If you host your own jitsi instance, this login requirement won't be there and you won't have this specific issue (though I assume you probably won't stay with Rocket.Chat anyway due to the E2EE requirement).
Can you just confirm that the meeting URL starts with https://meet.jit.si? You can check the URL by clicking on the small info button on the call's message block.