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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

#201

Post by betwixthewires »

mixedCase wrote: post #136
betwixthewires wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not "discouraged by the system UX" and what better way to get people to use f-droid than offering incentives to use it? Like your favorite app having better features when installed from there?

Sorry, but if you do not believe getting security warnings, having to go into the settings and mangle with configuration, just to be able to install a store downloaded from a website, sometimes go through additional configuration depending on your phone's modifications (looking at you Xiaomi) to then install the actual program you wanted is not "discouraged by the system UX", despite the real world experiences of com…

The amount of time it took you to type this response is longer than it takes to enable third party sources in settings. Most people do it at some point anyway, such as when downloading an app they want from it's website. There's no mangle about it, it literally pops up with "allow this app to install applications?" and takes you there directly.

If someone wants f-droid they'll do it. The problem is most people don't know what f-droid is. It has nothing to do with UX friction of installing it, there is virtually none.

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

#202

Post by mynameisvlad »

lathiat wrote: post #191
rawling wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ask permission to access all the user's contacts, or open a contact picker to let them pick a single contact?

This is a mistake I see on iOS a lot. You can use a 'system picker' for some things without a permission - photos is the most common one - many apps request full photo library access which I never want to grant when they could just use the system photo picker instead. In a similar way you could (in iOS) for this same feature just popup the share sheet to send a message. Though I am not familiar with the Android analo…

I believe in recent OS versions, whenever an app requests full library access, the OS asks you if you want to grant it, deny it, or grant a subset of photos which it fakes as the "full library" to the app.

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

#203

Post by benced »

kazinator wrote: post #171

Of course Google isn't going to look at the code. Most Google App Store apps are not open source, so why would that be a workflow at all? You have to evaluate those same deliverables that are downloaded to the user. To be able to infer properties of the build application from the source code review, it has to be shown that the two correspond; the shipped, built version comes from the code that was reviewed. Poring ov…

It was always funny to me reading those stories that Microsoft shares the source of windows with government officials who are worried they have NSA backdoors in a sterile environment: what on earth could you possibly spit from just reading source code? The function won’t be “postToNsa()”

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

#204

Post by BlueTemplar »

user3939382 wrote: post #8
encryptluks2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL... I can see Apple developers saying something like this while theu write about it on their even more limited and lockdowned devices.

You can agree that company X does Y thing wrong without deciding that you will make unlimited practical sacrifices in your life to support that position. If I cut my relationship with every institution I have an ethical problem with, I'd be living in the middle of the woods in a hut.

Thankfully it's nowhere that radical, and we can avoid both Android and iOS and build towards a better future, thanks to the recent revival of "real" Linux smartphones.

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

#205

Post by BlueTemplar »

sangnoir wrote: post #85
acdha wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going back to the original comment, iOS improved the situation from the carrier having veto power over the entire experience to just the phone vendor and the App Store is more open than some of the earlier ones were (standard terms). It also doesn’t have the ad / activity data issues. Android can be more open but let’s not pretend that a lot of devices have locked bootloaders, too, and has never lived up to that “PC”…

> Android can be more open but let’s not pretend that a lot of devices have locked bootloaders Not all Android handsets have unlockable bootloaders - but all handsets with unlockable bootloaders run Android.

I think you meant to say can run Android ?

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

#206

Post by BlueTemplar »

kolinko wrote: post #106
akira2501 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fo…

Hmm, yet Symbian had a third-party movie player that worked decently well... (finding it on the Web was a harder issue).

Wait, also a whole freaking browser : Opera mini - don't say that isn't complex !

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

#207

Post by Firmwarrior »

r2sk5t wrote: post #175
esprehn wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to know every app installed on the device to invite people you know?

Because we were using this: https://github.com/EddyVerbruggen/SocialSharing-PhoneGap-Plu... ...and didn't want to invest in this feature.

Good news, my friend: https://github.com/EddyVerbruggen/SocialSharing-PhoneGap-Plu...

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

#208

Post by BlueTemplar »

MisterTea wrote: post #101
Andrex wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have forgotten the video calls, have you ? Which is quite understandable, it's not like we use those much even today (in real life, I'm not talking about ads and movies), despite not having to pay extra to the cell carrier !

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

#209

Post by dougk16 »

kazinator wrote: post #171

Of course Google isn't going to look at the code. Most Google App Store apps are not open source, so why would that be a workflow at all? You have to evaluate those same deliverables that are downloaded to the user. To be able to infer properties of the build application from the source code review, it has to be shown that the two correspond; the shipped, built version comes from the code that was reviewed. Poring ov…

Google does some pretty surprising levels of static analysis of compiled source, particularly surrounding their API usage. There's a few examples I've run into but the first that pops to mind is when they started requiring a yes/no confirmation dialog before allowing a user to access a non-https resource through the WebView. There was no way a human was running into that on the particular app I was working on. We're not talking advanced static analysis but it's not a simple decompile and grep either.

In another case I had accidentally left some dead/debug AWS access credentials in a build and they sniffed those out too. Notable since that's not even Google-related. They had to have been looking for a particular AWS library method signature and how it was fed. I would bet on their static analysis getting more advanced, in which case it could also be used to prove that OP is using APIs/permissions in a safe manner. But of course they're not incentivized to do that.

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

#210

Post by BlueTemplar »

Aloha wrote: post #95
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…

Open Source cell phones is functionally a very very niche market. They end up costing more than the phone with the big binary blobs from the other android manufacturers, and often have older hardware than the hardware makers are willing to give away specs for. For what, I'd ask? The users don't care. 98% of Android and iOS users don't even know what open source is, and at least half of those who do know, don't really…

Perhaps... though I guess they will have to care if they end up being forbidden in most markets outside of the USA - nature abhors a vacuum !
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