For those interested, all these promised features have today been released in the 2nd beta of Ring: https://ring.cx/en/download It all seems to work astonishingly well and the look and feel of the clients has progressed immensely over the past months. Now I just need to figure out how to initiate a group chat, and most likely some way to easily send images inline to each other in singly or group chats will be needed to win more people over, but for now I'm very pleasantly surprised and look forward to this becoming the way of communication.