@DJ_Englishman For what it's worth, i started messing around with the EA desktop beta when reinstalling BF3/4 again last week and it's a pretty decent step up from origin. (granted, that's not saying a whole lot as it generally needed two passes to install DLCs correctly. Desktop app did it first try)
I've generally had the same friends list issues as mentioned by others on origin, and the EA desktop client pulled my steam friends list and for the short time i dabbled, did actually correctly show who was online and offline (with people on mixed platforms), as well as common games people have installed.
That said, it's a beta and my test time is limited, so ymmv.
Going to be checking again later tonight most likely, will see if it holds up again.
