I believe that the Black Desert+ companion app for mobile does not receive enough attention by developers. The integration of the guild and officer chats is very useful in general and one of the main selling points of the app, however it also has certain problems, the most prominent of which are when messages cannot be (fully) read, making it difficult to follow or engage in conversations:

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1. Option to disable the chat filter

First and foremost, there should be an option to disable the chat filter, like there is in-game. It's no secret that the filters in BDO aren't very useful as they censor regular and frequently used words like "something" and "random" at least partially. There are many reasons why people should be able to make the decision to see the unfiltered chat, among them being that guild chat is not an unmoderated space (and guild officers or higher may even use the Black Desert+ app for moderation, by looking at the chat history while not logged in!).

2. Show messages that include links (to inventory items)

As of now, messages that include a linked item (sent in-game by Shift + Left clicking an item in your inventory) do not appear in the mobile app at all. There is no acknowledgement that a message has been sent which cannot be displayed, nor is the written text shown without the linked item; it simply looks like there was no message. As a result, conversations involving an item (such as questions asked by new adventurers, or sharing the result of a successful enhancement) are often impossible to follow, and sometimes it is hard to make sense of a conversation because it is not immediately obvious that there was a message in-between which isn't visible.

Therefore, these messages should always be shown. I understand the complexity of implementing this, so I would like to suggest that at least a placeholder is inserted and the rest of the message is displayed as normal. For example, a message in-game "Mmm, delicious [Carrot Confit] for my horses!" could be displayed in the app as "Mmm, delicious [in-game item] for my horses!".

Of course, having a (localized) name of the item and enhancement level would be even better, while the mouse-over functionality and information such as caphras levels or the name of the adventurer who enhanced an item would not be required.

If links to the Adventurer's Board (F2) are working, they should follow a similar principle, and these could even be opened inside the app itself. Links to the guild-internal Find Party/Platoon feature can be omitted, as they cannot include other text anyway and therefore don't have much of an impact on conversations.

3. Display black spirit (etc.) emotes

Thankfully, in contrast to messages with links, messages with emotes are shown, however the emotes are only displayed as tags with the emote's number, like <E>123</E>. Displaying the emotes correctly would be a nice improvement and possible with minimal effort.

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4. Display time correctly

Messages are shown with the time of when they were sent, however it is always displayed in UTC, whereas other features of the Black Desert+ app like the world boss timetable do use timezone conversion. This should also apply to chat messages.

Furthermore, it would be a nice addition to display the date above the first message sent on a given day, as otherwise it is impossible to tell when messages were sent (for guilds which only exchange few messages each day, resulting in messages from multiple days of the week being shown in the app).

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These are the most important improvements for the guild chat feature of Black Desert+. There are other areas where the app can be significantly improved, which I shared in a separate post. I hope that this feedback will be reviewed and more development efforts will go towards this app to make it an even more powerful companion to the game.