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Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

gultsch.social

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Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#171

Post by qingcharles »

EasyMark wrote: post #169
carstenhag wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially tiktok is still live, and there it's super obvious they upload the contact list. First: they ask you. More importantly though: you don't even need to search for someone or someone's phone. You open the app and get 3 people suggested you never even knew had a tiktok account. Really really creepy when you just exchanged numbers with someone and you can see all their 50 tiktoks. Happened to me with a girl I m…

Could they simply be buying advertising databases which have possible connections for your name and ASL/phone number? Like the CIA and FBI seem to be doing. Plus likely your friends just give it whatever information it ask for so they already have your info anyway?

TikTok is buying data from almost everywhere. I browse to almost any site (on my desktop) and within minutes I am seeing ads on TikTok (on my phone) for the same/similar products.

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#172

Post by qingcharles »

axelthegerman wrote: post #42
carstenhag wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk with Google, usually this stuff can be resolved. Their bots flag stuff because of reasons. Yes, sometimes it's BS, but often there's something that you have missed to clarify.

Lol this must be a bigger joke than the app being removed in the first place. I never heard of anyone who was able to talk to anyone at Google. HN is full of folks getting apps suspended, locked out of their Google account and so on... Not being able to talk to someone is sometimes actually the only problem (though we all know the app store has much more issues than just that)

If you have an ads account they cold call you and email you constantly lol. Can they help me get back into my gmail account that I have the username/password/recovery email for? No.

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#173

Post by the_third_wave »

arendtio wrote: post #159
the_third_wave wrote: post #15

Conversations is on F-Droid so there is no reason to get it from the Play store. This goes for all free software apps, get them from F-Droid or similar free software repos and free yourself from the manipulations by the likes of Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon/etc. Yes, I understand this limits the reach to those who know about F-Droid (et al) but given the way XMPP has been pushed out by the aforementioned corporate e…

I am not entirely sure, but I believe the F-Droid version uses a different push technology, which can lead to slightly different app behavior/compatibility/battery usage. I used it for some years, but I switched to the Play Store version at some point. Maybe someone else remembers better?

Never having used the version on the play store I can not compare the two but I know the version on F-Droid works fine with messages arriving in time. Battery usage is minimal, under 1% with regular usage.

There is a an extensive comparison of power consumption by messaging apps out there somewhere on the 'net but I can not find it at the moment. In that test Conversations ended up as the 'best' (using the least amount of power) while Skype and Facebook Messenger ended up worst if I'm not mistaken.

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#174

Post by addandsubtract »

alias_neo wrote: post #136
russelg wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, self-hosted probably means that the user/org hosts the service that the app connects to. i.e. Element connecting to your own matrix home server, or something like next/ownCloud.

Correct, this is what I meant. The customer hosts their own infra, wherever they wish.

Oh, I see. Thanks for the clarification.

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#175

Post by clucas »

cma wrote: post #165
clucas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I understand about wear, but my point is that the behavior described in the links doesn't indicate that Chrome was scanning backup or media drives - only things like the registry, files directly related to Chrome, etc. If I have a drive with a bunch of random files on it, Chrome wasn't scanning those, was it?

I only found out about it from noise from my media/backup HDDs, it was grinding them constantly when idle, chrome and windows were on SSD.

Wow. Thanks for the info. Glad that feature has been removed...

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#176

Post by hulitu »

charcircuit wrote: post #149
exe34 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to realise when a large tech company says "security", they mean their security from your attempts to defend yourself. E.g. most of the locking down of devices isn't to make it harder for attackers who want your data (which would defeat their own objectives) but to keep things like DRM keys from you.

>they mean their security from your attempts to defend yourself No, they don't. They are protecting against malicous actors or at the most buggy software doing bad things on accident. >most of the locking down of devices isn't to make it harder for attackers who want your data Advances in this area definitely has been happening. The move to apps getting their own sandbox and having to be explicitly granted permission…

> No, they don't. They are protecting against malicous actors or at the most buggy software doing bad things on accident.

By sending all my data to Microsoft or Google so they can sell it on the open market ?

They are not "protecting against malicous actors". They fix bugs when they are openly exploited in the wild (hello Apple).

BTW, what happened to ProjectZero ? Never heard from them for a while.

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#177

Post by kzhe »

Dibby053 wrote: post #11

I use an open source SPAM call blocker (Yet another call blocker), which works fairly OK by querying a local spam phone number database. Recently Google Play decided to display a permanent notification prompting me to uninstall that "dangerous" app because it could "damage" my device. It's impossible to disable this notification. This app hasn't been updated in years. It has no ads. The only network request it makes…

I think you can remove it by disabling play protect, no?

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#178

Post by kaptainscarlet »

MattJ100 wrote: post #25
kaptainscarlet wrote: post #21

XMPP as a protocol is pretty much dead on Android with all the battery optimisations in the newer versions. You can't get a decent user experience unless you integrate it with Firebase.

Conversations has supported Google push notifications since 2016, long before Android started getting more aggressive about battery optimizations. It's been a standard feature of XMPP mobile apps for as long as it's been necessary.

I know. But they had to resort to a not-so-pretty foreground service to get around battery optimisations. Do you call that a good user experience?

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#179

Post by kaptainscarlet »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #74
sdflhasjd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are surely not purely client-side XMPP... clients, though? In order for you to receive push notifications, some server somewhere is connecting as you in order to relay the messages through GCM.

There is an XMPP standard for asking your own server to send "new message" pings via a GCM proxy. Nothing has to "connect as you".

Server pings are almost useless in dozemode.

Re: Google has removed Conversations_im from the Play Store

#180

Post by kaptainscarlet »

yaky wrote: post #46
kaptainscarlet wrote: post #21

XMPP as a protocol is pretty much dead on Android with all the battery optimisations in the newer versions. You can't get a decent user experience unless you integrate it with Firebase.

This was quite the opposite for me. Main reason my wife and I used XMPP for several years was because Conversations was the only app to get timely notifications on both googled and de-googled Android. And this worked until at least Android 11. At the time, Riot.im (now Element) either drained my battery checking for notifications without Google Play Services, or seemed to work fine, but did not get notifications in t…

Yes. Once an Android device goes into doze mode, there is nothing an app can do to sync in the background.you have to somehow extend your xmpp to route some messages via firebase which I believe whatsapp is doing
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