this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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Why is Signal so reliant on Google? It's not even in F-Droid
There is a fork on F-Droid that isn't reliant on Google push (it uses Unified Push) called Molly. I donate to both Molly and Signal.
It is better than nothing
Signal is using Google Push messaging, but it could be used with websocket. And officially it's not on fdroid because they don't want forks of their app
Yet the Molly fork supports UnifiedPush so I can reuse my connection with mf XMPP server to deliver notification from a server I control. Folks have asked for UnifiedPush or MQTT as an alternative to having multiple persistent socket connections open on your device, but Signal doesn’t seem to care.
How did you get Unified Push working? Last time I checked it required dedicated server side software
You have to proxy their socket. It’s dumb, & Signal is bad. Using FSM is bad for privacy & limits to only Android/iOS primary devices is a slap-in-the-face for users wish to bleak out of the duopoly owned by two ad companies.
How would that prevent you from forking the app? F-droid isn't a repository for the code of the app. I don't think this is related at all.
I don't actually know the reason why it's not on F-droid but I assume it has some historical reason. It has never been on F-drroid since Text-secure. Moxy Marlinspike was strictly against it afaik. If somebody has more detail on it, feel free to share it.
You're not allowed to upload apps with proprietary blobs. Google Push services is a proprietary blob.
Because today if you find a Signal app on Fdroid you're sure that it's nonofficial, on the play store only one app is allowed, the official.
I'm guessing its not fully open source, but I don't actually know.
The App is open source, but they include google push services, which is not
It is fully open-source. The distribution of the application is completely unrelated. You can still read the code and verify the build you're running.
Thanks for the clarification.
They are vehemently against self hosting as well.