I was with you all the way to
>We are now decrypting network traffic to show that we are not doing anything with the contacts,
what network traffic? You said its a local phone dialer ...
Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
111–120 of 296 posts
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#112I was intrigued by the prospect of a foss voip phone app that's cross platform - but was unable to find the repo. for the app (libary repos are available and obvious, just not the app as a whole). Anyone know where it lives?
The website calls it the Voys app but I think it's actually called Vialer: https://github.com/open-voip-alliance/vialer It's the only full app in their repo and it fits the description they gave on the website.
Does it work with twilio sip trunking?
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#113I was with you all the way to >We are now decrypting network traffic to show that we are not doing anything with the contacts, what network traffic? You said its a local phone dialer ...
It’s a VoIP app, network traffic is likely.
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android is not Google.
They do control the default app repository, so from the PoV of many users, at least with respect to apps, the two are pretty much equivalent.
There are Android phones sold at least in Russia without Google services at all. People use them mostly fine.
And no, it's not mandatory for developers to use Google Play. It's a bit more work to DIY your app distribution, but you get total independence in exchange. It's ultimately developer's choice to make.
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#115Thankfully the use of Google Play is not mandatory. You could as well distribute your app from your website and make it update itself — you know, just like people did for ages with desktop software.
Yeah, good luck with that. Nearly nobody installs apps from outside Google Play.
Huh? One example: everyone did sideload Pokemon Go in 2016 because its availability on Google Play was very limited for a very long time.
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#116With the exception of Signal, I never give apps access to my contacts. If you think that's paranoid, remember how apps like LinkedIn used this kind of information in the past[1]. Thankfully on iOS apps almost always work without contact access (is this mandated by App Store rules?). It's not clear from the article if the app just asks for access to contacts or requires it, but if you can't make your Voip app work wit…
there are multiple apps i have encountered that would not let you type in a phone number to start a chat. you HAVE to give contact access and have whatever number you wanted to chat with saved as a contact
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#117Two companies should not decide what goes in and out of the mobile ecosystem, or we need to stop non-standard and proprietary ecosystems from becoming a social norm and building infrastructure on top of them.
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#118Earlier 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.
Before Android and iOS, no third-party developer cared about smartphones/PDAs, because they were a tiny sliver of the market and so you couldn't make money targeting them. Bigcorps like Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter might make free apps for these, just to cover them (since their own employees used them); but no ISV cared. If you were an ISV developing paid "apps" for "mobile" at all, you were developing J2ME apps for feature-phones.
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#119The 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.
It doesn't matter if you want to pay or not. These companies need to make more money than they did the previous quarter. So they need to always find new way to exploit continuously.
Re: Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention, given their cookie policy, they claim that they are "very privacy conscious" is dubious at best (no button to directly reject all non-necessary cookies, navigation to a different page to configure cookie preferences, claiming that analytics cookies are required). I'm going to go ahead and say that probably they are misrepresenting what is happening.
To give the benefit of the doubt, knowing nothing else about this company: This is clearly a South African based company. GDPR and cookie may be important compliance but it's not top of the totem pole - the local South African equivalent law (POPI) is more about data processing than cookies. Plenty of sites have not updated their cookie UX for the newer regulations. I've even noticed some sites serve different forms…
It's not, it's a Dutch company