And other projects, including the GPL project Quassel, do have mobile clients (although Quasseldroid, which I maintain, isn’t exactly the best client in the world).
I've seen it, but it's nothing like even Quasseldroid. And quasseldroid is already a horrible codebase (mostly because I took over maintenance when I knew nothing about code quality).
Yet even Quasseldroid manages to be better.
That said, there is truly a need for a really good, FLOSS irc client ob mobile.
You're saying they're nothing like each other but are providing no examples. Besides one being an app and one being a website, what are the differences? Neither quasseldroid or Lounge have push notifications or searchable messages yet, so they seem to be pretty identical feature-wise.
EDIT: and we aren't talking about code-base, are we? If so, Lounge's is pretty solid (although it is in a pretty constant state of transition from ES5 -> ES6)
Quassel has them, doesn't mean Quasseldroid does :P
And I don't think you can say due to it's nature it's faster... I run Lounge in 20+ active channels on my iPhone SE and it runs perfectly. Native != more performant (and if the code base is as bad as you say I wouldn't expect it to be).
The bad part of the codebase is bugginess, and RAM usage. Especially because it always keeps all messages in RAM.
But what I consider a bug is already the best case scenario for the web client.
And 20+ active channels is nothing.
I'm in 460 active channels, with combined 40'000 users, and I get about a hundred to 200 messages a minute, while using the app on 64kbps connection.
(That's my test case for what should usable)
And quasseldroid already has code for those two, and a rewrite is almost done, I'm just waiting for the core changes to happen, and then release version 2.0
And other projects, including the GPL project Quassel, do have mobile clients (although Quasseldroid, which I maintain, isn’t exactly the best client in the world).