this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Privacy

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[โ€“] Dehydrated 38 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Signal doesn't "heavily use Google services". They only use proprietary libraries and integrations for 2 purposes: Donations and push notifications. Signal uses the platform's native way of handling push notifications, on iOS it's APNs and on Android it's FCM. This is also the reason why it's not available on F-Droid. You can use a fork of the app like Signal-FOSS or Molly. These remove all proprietary dependencies and you can download them from their custom F-Droid repositories.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Molly is wonderful but I use signal-foss because it shares openstreetmap location by default ๐Ÿคฉ

[โ€“] Dehydrated 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Molly claims to use OSM in their FOSS builds: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android/blob/main/README.md#dependency-comparison. I can't confirm this because I never use any Signal features that require map integration.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wow, this is news for me. I've been following this issue on the git but there's no news about this there at least.

https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android/issues/203

[โ€“] Dehydrated 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Have you tried out Molly? If yes, did you use the normal version or the FOSS build? Btw the Version available on Accrescent is also FOSS

[โ€“] roguetrick 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Have you tried out Molly?

Nah, I get hypomania from buproprin. I think ecstacy would put me straight into serotonin syndrome.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago
[โ€“] Dehydrated 2 points 9 months ago

I like the direction this is going

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I have used it (molly-foss)but haven't in a while, just waiting for it to enable OSM location sharing to switch back to it. Didn't know about accrescent. What's the deal about it compared to droidify or f-droid?

[โ€“] Dehydrated 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It's more secure than F-Droid. It's still in a pretty early stage of development though and currently only offers a handful of apps.

  • App signing key pinning: first-time app installs are verified so you don't have to TOFU.
  • Signed repository metadata: repository contents are protected against malicious tampering.
  • Automatic, unattended, unprivileged updates (Android 12+): updates are handled seamlessly without relying on privileged OS integration.
  • First-class support for split APKs: downloaded APKs are optimized for your device to save bandwidth.
  • No remote APK signing: developers are in full control of their app signing keys.
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago
[โ€“] Buddahriffic 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I have to be misunderstanding what you're saying because it sounds like you're happy that app shares your location by default? Or do you mean it uses that format by default when you decide to share a location?

[โ€“] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I meant that it uses the OSM "format" when I decide to share it voluntarily. That totally makes sense for me. I don't want to be sharing no Google links.