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Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

voys.co.za

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Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#101

Post by MisterTea »

Andrex wrote: post #29
squarefoot wrote: post #9

The mobile ecosystem has been built with the sole intent of milking users through targeted advertising, media consumption and unnecessary services subscription, so I find normal that corporations behind the OSes fight hard to maintain the platform as closed as possible (proprietary or seemingly open OSes, closed drivers, locked bootloaders etc). Their deepest fear is seeing their ecosystem conquered by Open Source, o…

Oh man, you should have seen the mobile sphere before Android...

You mean it how it barley existed and all we did was talk and text?

Yes. And it was marvelous.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#102

Post by mixedCase »

betwixthewires wrote: post #96
mixedCase wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And nobody will use it because third party stores are discouraged by the operating system's UX.

Lots of people use f-droid. It's as easy as installing f-droid from browser and then checking a box in settings.

I am aware. I'm one of them. Unfortunately us "lots of people" are still probably <0.1% of Android users.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#103

Post by kolinko »

int_19h wrote: post #74
Andrex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, you should have seen the mobile sphere before Android...

Before Android and iOS, the dominant smartphone/PDA platforms were Windows Mobile and Symbian. And whatever their usability issues were, I don't recall there being a problem with downloading (or even buying boxed) third-party software directly from the authors and installing it directly.

As a developer from that era - developing for Symbian was absurdly difficult and awkward.

Around 2007 we tried building an app that scanned barcodes in a store to show you comparison from online stores. Symbian's APIs for cameras were so broken, that we couldn't get a decent enough resolution of photos. Java had permission/ux issues that made the app unfeasible. It was literally impossible to build an app like this back then, even though phones had good enough cameras already.

Not to mention the fact that you needed a whole studio to build and test even a simple app like this - so many variants of OSes, and phones, and every single one had it's own quirks.

And to add an insult to the injury - we had to pirate the SDK, because the official links to SDKs didn't work for a few days, and nobody seemed to notice.

So yeah, in theory the users could download apps to the devices. But in practice it was easier for devs to hack into iPhone 1.0 and build apps there - even before the official app store launch, than it was ever to build something for Symbian and the others.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#104

Post by croes »

enriquec wrote: post #76
r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #65

Ahh a privacy oriented company, that won't allow you to opt out of their analytic cookies this breaking the law in the EU. Or in other words, not privacy oriented at all.

europe's cookie fiasco is so idiotic - why don't you just disable them in your browser if you care?

Because there wanted cookies and unwanted cookies.

Websites could store my decision to disallow tracking cookies, but somehow they don't do that.

So it's not a european fiasco but website malice.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#105

Post by jeroenhd »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #79
MaxikCZ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC: At least in Europe, they needn't ask for essential cookies. They need to ask for cookies used for tracking, profiling, fingerprinting and consent to share collected info with third parties. The rules also state that the path to reject those cookies must be as easy as it is to accept them, so if they have "accept all" button, they are required to also provide "reject all" button, that has similar visibility and…

That‘s what I thought. I just started a prolonged burnout vacation. How do I hold them accountable / sue them? I will look it up.

You report them to your local DPA. The DPA will look into the complaint, ask the company to fix the problem and/or start an investigation, and maybe eventually, hand out a fine.

How long this takes depends on the problem and the capacity for the DPA. If Google or Facebook are involved in a new data sharing scheme, their cases will get priority over a website not setting cookies right.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#106

Post by kolinko »

akira2501 wrote: post #87
Andrex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, you should have seen the mobile sphere before Android...

It was a nascent market, and the first versions of Android and iOS were not significantly better than what was already being offered. Is the suggestion that we wouldn't have put any effort into developing the ecosystem if Google and Apple didn't decide to involve themselves in it?

What? No, no, no. iOS and Android were night and day compared to Symbian and the other operating systems of that era. Aside from the very basic games and super-simple apps, it was virtually impossible to write anything significant for non-Apple/Android devices.

Because of that, even before the official launch of an iOS SDK, there were more apps for iPhone (because people hacked it), than there ever were for Nokia.

For WindowsCE, sure there were apps, but phones didn't run Windows really then. Only PDAs.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#107

Post by jeroenhd »

j45 wrote: post #62

With Rust and WA emerging it will be interesting to see how long it takes to get a voip client as a PWA that just runs in the browser. WebOS when with Palm was ahead of it's time from a software perspective and couldn't get the hardware out. The ability for all apps to be JS/HTML only with WebOS would be super interesting.

To get that to work, you'd need to run some kind of WebRTC-to-SIP proxy which would be abused to hell and back.

There seems to be an abandoned open source project that you can use to do this: https://github.com/saycel/Saycel.Phone

3cx also seems to have built a web app for their SIP product: https://www.3cx.com/blog/releases/web-client-pwa/

No need to get Rust or WASM involved. Built-in browser support should allow you to do this stuff with just Javascript.

Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse

#110

Post by duxup »

squarefoot wrote: post #9

The mobile ecosystem has been built with the sole intent of milking users through targeted advertising, media consumption and unnecessary services subscription, so I find normal that corporations behind the OSes fight hard to maintain the platform as closed as possible (proprietary or seemingly open OSes, closed drivers, locked bootloaders etc). Their deepest fear is seeing their ecosystem conquered by Open Source, o…

I fear we as users have been trained as well and perpetuate it. People generally don't want to pay, so we're the product, advertising pays ... the whole ecosystem is a mess.
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