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GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

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Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#171

Post by microtonal »

subscribed wrote: post #57
microtonal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of the AOSP apps feel like you have to rewrite them for modern standards now and then you can basically have them in maintenance mode for years. The AOSP messaging app has also lasted for 15+ (?) years and has basically had no maintenance from Google for many years. Modernizing these apps seems very high-impact. These are the very first things a new user sees and after the initial modernization, they should b…

> Messaging, high impact. Messaging can be replaced with one of the hundreds decent messaging apps. Unlike the backup app which is utterly unusable, untrustworthy and frankly crap. And CANNOT be replaced by anything else. As it stands it's impossible to have reliable backups in GOS.

Very few of them will support RCS (I think currently only Google Messages?), which GrapheneOS also wants to support.

I agree that a new backup system is also high impact, but there can be more than one high-impact thing, and the Message app is really low-hanging fruit.

Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#174

Post by grapheneos »

mmooss wrote: post #145
Cider9986 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get most of their donations from cryptocurrency. Mostly small Monero donations but also Bitcoin and Ethereum. They have 14 devs 13 are payed in ETH and 1 in CAD. Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025. Vitalik Buterin may have donated at least some time ago. Proton donates double digits. Cape has donated around 100k https://www.cape.co/blog/cape-supports-grapheneos and plans to donate 100k…

Thank you! Though I still wonder: > Iirc they said something like 2 million in donations in 2025. That's not enough for 14 devs, plus infrastructure, etc. > There's estimated 500k users so if 25% donated 10 dollars a year that's 1.25 million. Unfortunately, 25% would be extraordinary for any project. They should make their financing public (and maybe they do), being a non-profit and also asking people to trust them w…

Our server infrastructure costs around $200/month. All of our dedicated servers are sponsored. If we had to replace all of the current sponsored servers then we could scale it back a bit and keep the cost around $2000/month for the bare minimum we need.

We're paying around 10 full time developers along with multiple other people. That includes someone in a CFO/COO role and several people who handle community management. Why do you think we wouldn't be able to afford this? We're paying developers around the world rather than hiring people in Silicon Valley. It doesn't cost $250k/year to pay an experienced developer in Eastern Europe.

100% of the funding for GrapheneOS comes from the donations. The vast majority of the donations come from individuals. Cape sells phones with GrapheneOS and is donating $100k/year without any formal sponsorship or deal with them. Donations from individuals are well over $1m/year and will hopefully reach $2m/year soon. We're spending around half of the funding and need to greatly expand our team.

We have a lot more funding available to significantly expand our team are in the process of doing exactly that. We recently hired 3 full time app developers who are working on overhauling our apps. We plan to hire a couple more along with more OS developers. There's also an open role for an experienced QA engineer.

https://grapheneos.org/hiring

Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#175

Post by Brian_K_White »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #49
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #40

Everytime I read GrapheneOS news I search for news related to Fairephone. It's such a shame that there's still no official plan for Fairephone to work on requirements for GrapheneOS. The combination of those 2 would be fantastic. It would also open a big new market (I assume) for Fairephone so not sure why there seems no clear sign in that direction at all (to my knowledge).

Everytime I see Fairphone mentioned whenever there's news about GrapheneOS I'm confused as to why people keep on conflating both when they obviously have very different goals.

The only one conflating anything is yourself.

This is no great conundrum. There is simply a large set overlap. A lot of the people who care about one one, also care about the other.

It's the same as Framework owners and Linux users.

FW is not a linux laptop company. They didn't even barely say the word Linux initially. Their selling point was the repairability and configurability. Only after they had been shipping for a while it became unavoidable that a huge fraction of their users were linux and even freebsd users. Only after some time and only gradually they started providing a little bit of official acknowledgement and support for Linux.

But repair parts and linux os don't have anything to do with each other! zomg why is everyone conflating Framework with a linux laptop company???

Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#176

Post by Dylan16807 »

armadyl wrote: post #151
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the sales numbers if it were poor versus the rest of the lineup. For one, the sales were still perfectly respectable. "Versus the rest of the lineup" is doing a ton of work here, because the rest of the iPhone models sell like crazy. For two, it is still bizarre that manufacturers refuse to make small phones even with that in mind. If you wear very small clothes (or very large clothes) that won't sell as many units…

Bro the Mini was a flop for Apple, it could barely surpass 5% of all iPhone sales during its run. It would be nonsensical for a publicly traded company to leave money on the table and keep an underperforming product alive when they could put that towards the better performing bigger screen iPhones instead. For a small company sure it could be considered a success. I don’t think tech can be compared to the fashion ind…

> Bro the Mini was a flop for Apple, it could barely surpass 5% of all iPhone sales during its run.

They were making the SE at the exact same time as the mini, two years in a row, and the mini still got billions in sales. If they want a bigger percent, then do it less often and don't split the demand. It's been four and a half years since they did either mini or SE. People would buy plenty.

> leave money on the table

> opportunity cost

If it cost them that much to have extra models, they wouldn't have five iphone 16 variants that are all just different enough to need five internal layouts. And four 17 variants plus the air.

Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#177

Post by emayljames »

sva_ wrote: post #92
greatgib wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking quite the opposite. I hope RCS can die fast. We already have chat apps WhatsApp, signal, telegram, you can even create your own. I'm quite happy that SMS for one are not something centralized by the giant US big corp. Would be the dream of Google to get all your messages as a gateway.

So I looked into this because my idea of RCS was that it was pretty decentralized direct encrypted communication. TIL that RCS was designed as a fairly decentralized protocol where every carrier could run their own RCS servers, but it didnt get adoption. So Google stepped in and built their own routing infrastructure, and now mostly all RCS is centralized on Google's servers (even if you use an iPhone, because the RC…

The implementations of RCS servers that were being done (here in the UK) by carriers, had many issues. A lot of the time your Google messages couldn't connect to the carrier RCS server, messages silently didn't send. I don't know if that was due to something like the carriers not updating their servers, or bad implementation though.

Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#178

Post by grapheneos »

mmooss wrote: post #5

With a seemingly insurmountable workload - maintain an actually secure OS fork - for a small team, I wonder how GrapheneOS prioritizes things like messaging apps? I'm not saying it's wrong at all; I am just interested in the thinking inside a project like that. I can imagine many reasons to devote resources to it: * A platform is only as good as its apps. If they want to grow GOS in the general public, it requires a…

> as far as SMS/MMS can be secure

We've announced our plan to add RCS with Messaging Layer Security (MLS) for E2EE compatible with Google Messages and iOS.

> GOS got a big donation

We receive large donations on an ongoing basis.

> or has a volunteer that wants to do messaging

Everyone doing substantial work on the project is paid to do it full time. We hired all the people doing large amounts of high quality volunteer work. We've moved on to a process of filtering candidates based on their CV, an interview process and small test projects.

Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#179

Post by gib444 »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #102

The biggest issue I have with the degoogled Androids is no RCS chats out of the box. At least for me, it stinks these days to not have it, and you're forced to do sneaky things to get it.

> out of the box

Right. Installing Google Messages is not "out of the box" just to clear up the sibling comment as they are a stickler for accuracy. It is not installed by default

Re: GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

#180

Post by Markoff »

mewse-hn wrote: post #4

Does it do RCS?

RCS requires Google account and Google Play services, completely useless, I'm better off with Whatsapp not requiring any of these to function, heck I xan even download APK directly from whatsapp website without play store or aurora
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