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GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

grapheneos.social

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Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#111

Post by mitxela »

exceptione wrote: post #6

> RCS isn't an open platform in practice. It isn't even as open as SMS/MMS. It heavily depends on proprietary Google and carrier infrastructure in practice. We can start by replicating Google's approach and then we can work on only using carrier services for carriers where it's actually supported. What is the point of RCS though? It seems to be strictly inferior to Signal. It seems a Google product meant to serve Goo…

I believe it was meant to be federated, like SMS, and then in practice it wasn't. With Signal you depend on your carrier and on Signal - with SMS you only depend on your carrier.

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#112

Post by mitxela »

glub wrote: post #92
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RCS was DOA from day one as far as I'm concerned. The carriers being involved in any capacity deeper than providing dumb pipes alone was enough to make it pointless, but no E2E in the base spec makes it extra pointless. They may as well have just extended SMS to be more capable, because that's what they've effectively created.

I don't know much about RCS other than that carriers need to be involved, but there's a way to not involve them, which Google did for a while using some kind of compat-service (jibe or something?), and then they stopped doing it. Never seen RCS working on any carrier ever since. I don't understand why Google couldn't just continue doing what it was doing. Why require carriers?

The intended purpose of RCS was to be federated between carriers, just like SMS. If you centralise it then it's just a worse version of any of Google's abandoned chat apps. But there's a realpolitik reason to insist on centralised RCS: because it's already got the reputation of decentralisation, it makes it look like Google is better than it actually is.

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#113

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

yndoendo wrote: post #95
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no alternative. Apple isn't going to let them build on top of iOS, and anything except those two is dead in the water because it'll never have users because it is missing a bunch of critical apps, and will never have those apps because it doesn't have users.

FuriLabs makes a Linux phone that is designed as a daily driver. Looking at it to replace Android.

I have it. It's far too slow to be useful, and it's not the hardware's fault. GTK and Libhybris are bad separately and hot garbage together. This problem won't be going away while the hardware is relevant.

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#114

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

broodbucket wrote: post #66
ravenstine wrote: post #32

I hope they replace the AOSP keyboard with FUTO keyboard. I'm mostly fine with the other stock apps, but that keyboard was the one thing I absolutely had to end up replacing due to its jenky behavior.

I use Gboard with the network permission disabled. It works well but I hope they have a better stock keyboard, I haven't found any others that don't annoy me in one way or another.

The latest FUTO works just as well as Gboard for me. Their somewhat recent update to their swiping library really changed the game, and their voice recognition is also pretty decent.

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#115

Post by bentley »

qurren wrote: post #83
ConceitedCode wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but what could graphene do in the meantime? It's either make it work for the moment or stop those apps from working today. I'd like to see them lay more ground work for web apps but it's a tough spot and the easiest choice at the moment is to continue with AOSP.

I mean we privacy nerds all love webapps but the reality is the people actually in charge of S&P500 companies hate them. They really, REALLY want to fingerprint your device and use it as a verification and tracking mechanism. Until that changes, webapps aren't going to sell. Even Google tried multiple things to "sell" the idea of webapps (e.g. Polymer project) in 2011-2015 and failed. Funny enough, Wechat kinda succe…

I find, as a user primarily of free and open source software, it’s really the opposite: native FOSS apps have minimal tracking and analytics that defaults to off or is easily disabled, while most free and open source webapps are behind Cloudflare, blocking access to them until I turn off my VPN and disable the anti‐fingerprinting features in my browser.

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#116

Post by grapheneos »

drnick1 wrote: post #31

Certainly, with Opus 5 and GPT-6, modernizing or even completely rewriting self-contained, non-critical tools seems like a Friday afternoon job now. I wonder however how important this is, in the grand scheme of things. I use GrapheneOS and the bundled messaging app is serviceable. It isn't pretty, but it gets the job done.

We're definitely not churning out code with AI models. There's no vibe coding going on in GrapheneOS. We're carefully writing and reviewing code as we've always done. We now have additional tools to assist with it. The main way we're using AI models is for code review and helping to write a lot more tests than we used to. It's helping to improve our code quality, not reducing it. We're not trying to get things done substantially faster.

The code generated by even the bleeding edge publicly available frontier models is rarely good enough to meet our standards. AI models are creating a lot of additional work for us because of how many more security issues are being discovered in upstream projects. It's also helping us raise our standards for our own work by pointing it at that to get extremely pedantic criticism catching many things we would miss.

We've hired multiple experienced app developers who have spent months working on modernizing the Messaging app and carefully reviewing it. There's no vibe coding going on for our apps. Why not look at the actual process of porting Messaging to Compose and our code review for each incremental part of the process?

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3...

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#117

Post by grapheneos »

BearOso wrote: post #78
Cider9986 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using AI [1]. I don't think messaging app is non-critical though. [1] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera/tree/compose

I dunno. If they're using AI, it's well controlled. I don't see a lot of artifacts you usually get from full-on vibe-coding.

Our code quality standards are very high. Vibe coding is not capable of meeting those standards. The details of how things get written and improved to meet our standards is up to individual developers. We don't have a policy against developers using AI for assistance. They need to understand all of the code and it needs to pass our code review. Our code review is now usually a lot more thorough than before. In addition to human review, we regularly pass code through a couple frontier AI models and then review the results to figure out which claims it makes are valid. Even the frontier models hallucinate many non-existent problems and often get a lot of details wrong when they find real problems, but they do find a lot of real problems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592770

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#118

Post by Cider9986 »

pizzaiolo wrote: post #37

Graphene is clearly bullish on Android, but I have no idea why. The writing is on the wall, Google is slowly asphyxiating AOSP.

Have you used GrapheneOS? It's fantastic UX[1] and while probably being one of if not the most secure and private OS available.

[1] thanks to Android (once you replace some of the worse default apps, but they are doing that as we can see)

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#119

Post by unrented7977 »

wolvoleo wrote: post #86
ConceitedCode wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think graphene could maintain a hard fork with manufacturer support (Motorola). At least for a while. Long term viability is an open question.

They could for a while but what's the point if it's not sustainable? Google is not going to turn around and make it more open again. With every Android release you will build up more feature base to replicate. Unless you cut all ties and drive a separate ecosystem but good luck getting enough developers to buy into that.

And the US might grow a government with a spine and take Android away from Google. It's all hypothetical.

Re: GrapheneOS Overhauled Default Apps and Secure Clipboard

#120

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

wolvoleo wrote: post #73
ebb_earl_co wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From [0], it seems that RCS can use the cellular signal instead of LTE or 5G: > In cases where RCS is able to operate over cellular networks without data, it supports messaging as well as file transfer, enriched calling, and more. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services

In LTE and 5G there exists no cellular signal without data. That was a 2G/3G thing. Since 4G everything is data. The separate sms and voice services are gone. And 3G is rapidly being deprecated.

That's not quite true. VoLTE was an optional part of 4G in the beginning. I had one of the gaming ASUS phones that shipped with 4G, but no VoLTE. 6 months after getting it, the US phone carriers conspired to make VoLTE mandatory for connecting to their towers, effectively bricking my device. ASUS never issued the firmware update that would have enabled the feature in the modem, which had the capability, and the community hack to enable it never worked for me.
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