@craftyguy I feel you for the notifications. As for the key mgmt, that has gotten much better as in more transparent. And as someone who has recently lost an Android phone (on the bottom of the sea ðŸ˜), neither WhatsApp ("new security number" and chat history lost) nor Signal ("enter your PIN and recovery key") were really any better. (Not that this is any excuse)
Almost the same by me with one additional point
3) Audio/Video calls was unreliable too.
But I moved all my family from Matrix to XMPP. A lot of changes happened there for the past 6-8 years. There is also so-called "Great Invitations". One can invite someone to register without to be techy. Exchanging contacts with scanning their QR is also easy.
The thing with the new Phone is almost the same. If you don't have backup to restore from, there are no old messages.
Conversatins can do the backups automatically. Restore from backup is easy too - pointing to the location where the backup file is, and then type your password. Restoring from backup, not only brings your old msgs. It also configure you account, server, port, etc.
By iOS if you have iCloud backups is even easier.
@craftyguy
In my experience the google-push service works quite well with the playstore element-x version.
I dont know whats wrong with unified push, but it never worked relaible for me with matrix.
@craftyguy Backing up the recovery key to a password manager works but making people use a password manager... That's a challenge in itself
@craftyguy@freeradical.zone same here, but not yet six years 
. Those two issues stop me from promoting matrix to more people.
"but what about xmpp?"
We did that for about 3 years before moving to Matrix. At the time, OMEMO support was quite rough, especially on iOS. And XEP support was hit/miss for various clients that people would install.
Every time I ask folks to switch to some new chat tech, I burn some serious "capital" with the family. So like, I gotta be 200% confident the new thing we switch to is better at meeting our requirements 😅
🖖@craftyguy Have you tried it ever since? 6 years is a very long time. Snikket is probably best for a usecase like yours.
@craftyguy I completely agree. I got my family over to Matrix a few years ago and although it had it's issues (the 2 you mentioned mostly) it's been smooth sailing otherwise and I had no real complaints. What I _did_ have complaints about was "switching again? We already switched to Telegram for you". I'm not about to get them to switch again.
The tool does the job and I think it's going in the right direction, it's not worth burning credits again.
I managed to get my close family using #Matrix for communication, we have been using it for about 6yrs. For the most part, it has worked pretty well!
But the 2 biggest complaints I have are:
1) key mgmt is soooo hard for people who are "non-technical" to understand and do consistently. So many times someone got a new phone, traded in the old then couldn't read old messages on Matrix
2) Android matrix app notifications are totally busted for several folks. We can't rely on this for fast comm.