It does. The Signal app for Android does not support being a secondary device. It must be the primary device with a phone number.

do you mean that it does not have a prompt for the SMS code anymore, and it reads the code only from the received SMS?

In addition, whatever Play Store settings they use excluded all of our tablets, even the one that had a SIM

that’s a weird choice, I thought a main goal of them was user freedom

the play store version isn’t as trustworthy even if the original devs published it there, since google forced all developers a few years ago to hand over their signing keys. the signature is how you know the app wasn’t modified by anyone, and that actually the developer released the apk

there isn’t, but as others have replied you can hide it from yourself

and all the things you find on this list, too

I was hesitant to open this post because I already know about rustdesk, but eventually I did to see the community’s opinion on it. I’m so glad that I did because this is terrible!

I think more people should hear about all of this

or neither, when cloosing open source tools worth their salt. in more and more fields such tools appear, fortunately

I had the impression that it has a Russian connection, but anyways, it’s good to be in the lookout for such things

in my book they are more of a risk than the USA. The USA already has political influence, for china to do it they need to use more extreme methods, like infiltrating your computer and use it and perhaps you as their tools

honestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches

to be quite honest I don’t want to see any large business around my project unless they are paying. They are not my target audience, and I’m not writing to funnel money into their pockets

you can have third party apps as system apps. you can even write your own, but the API docs are somewhat harder to find. nowadays you install them with magisk modules (not all of them contains an app), so that it is easier to revert and also to hide from those looking for it with a bad intent

Official Signal app. It asks Google to check Signal servers for notifications and to send them to you if there are any.

I don’t think that’s how push notifications work. It would not be instant, and very frequent polls are very resource intensive, even more if you had to do it for the servers of a million different apps.
UnifiedPush has a diagram here, and the popular proprietary push providers should work the same way too.

Also, Linux does not auto-update itself, and that’s bad mostly when looking at the programs (like the web browser) that did that automatically, and here it can’t anymore.

I understand that most users don’t update their system and the utils they downloaded, but that’s essential for a web browser.

I was considering that I should just install Firefox as the fatpak for everyone, instead of the core package manager, for this and other reasons, but my users have so little memory in their old machines that it’s already barely necessary.

I hate to say this, but windows rarely breaks itself from updates. basic things like the desktop, audio and the lock screen is essentially never broken after an update.

yeah it may reset the audio settings and other such things, and I don’t know how do they manage to do that, but that’s relatively simple to revert.

probably it’s just thanks to old, battle tested code though. can’t wait for Linux desktop systems to reach that point

having it just work is a necessary step to gett there

Automatic updates are essential. and unfortunately, it should not be an option to keep an old version of something, because through shared libraries it will hold back the entire system. fatpaks should be used for those programs.

Fortunately it’s getting there, like KDE is working on it too, but it’s still got a long way.

ok, but on a smartphone, with touch screen?

oh, that’s nice!

yes, but while you use the official signal app, doesn’t it work so that signal servers always send the notification to google’s appropriate servers?

if that’s right, how is it being stopped?
on Matrix, the Element mobile app has a menu for manually unregistering the push targets.

CalyxOS does. It asks in a setup similar to what most common phones use with their stock ROM. MicroG is probably installed, but it’s services are turned off.

Do you use any app from aurora or outside fdroid? If your answer is no, than you can use android without a GMS package.

Yes, there’s a few. My favorite music player, a local public transport app, a file manager… such things. They work fine. I was already not touching “corporate apps” with a 10 feet pole for a long time, so I don’t get to experience their issues.

Also as I wrote, location won’t work for you underground or inside concrete buildings. If you are fine with these kind of limitations than you can obviously.

How would it otherwise? Network based location?

Marwin (the main developer of microg) said in some interview that he doesn’t want microg to exist, and in a perfect world we shouldn’t need such workaround. I would be also happy if android wouldn’t depend this muhc on google

I totally agree. This is part of the reason I don’t want to turn it on, ever. I don’t want to use apps that support that shit, even unknowingly.