211–220 of 221 posts
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Have you looked at Obtainium? https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium It can use apkmirror and apkpure as sources. Along with lots of others.
I'm not particularly security conscious, but this seems very vulnerable to malware.
Personally I mostly just use it with github, and checking the integrity of those apks is easy enough.
Has the author of this article ever used a custom ROM? There are so many free alternatives for these apps out there. If I remember correctly, LineageOS ships with their own version of Dialer/Messages anyway. I usually replace them with the versions of SimpleMobileTools, which work just fine. The main difficulty for custom ROMs are not these standard apps. The real issues are bootloaders which cannot be unlocked, undo…
> Just look how Google effectively broke the AuroraStore App recently. For anyone who has been hit by this, you can workaround the api issue by long pressing on a playstore http link and clicking open in app (aurora icon). So you can't search using the app anymore, but if you have the link to what you want you can still install without playstore or a google account. It's frustrating but isn't the end.
The real concern is not the loss of the AOSP apps but the lack of new but mandatory features in AOSP and even more undocumented APIs. For example, RCS only works with Google messenger and there's no sign of that expanding (unless your Samsung). Even Visual Voicemail which should/is an open standard has a lot of carrier specific code (I think it can still be extracted from the Google Phone app but I'm not sure on the…
> RCS only works with Google messenger I don't get how Google can continue to call RCS an "industry standard" and do their campaigns publicly shaming Apple for not implementing it when this is the case. Not to mention RCS messages are mostly being routed through Google's own servers anyway because no carriers have implemented it. No wonder they want Apple to get on board with this "standard," it replaces SMS with a G…
You're of course right about Google being hypocrites because they want to route messages for Apple users through Google servers. The RCS standard doesn't support E2EE natively, so Google will see everything unless you use Google Messages which implements E2EE, but who knows that data they collect there..
I wonder if Google would agree to RCS with Apple running the servers. I seriously doubt it.
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QKSMS is great!
QKSMS has a better interface than Simple SMS Messenger, but it's unmaintained, and for me, it had the same or worse problems with MMS than Simple SMS has.
Here are my problems with Simple SMS that are fixed in QKSMS:
1) Long delay updating conversation after receiving a message (>5s).
2) Date sorting broken (old messages appearing at top of queue for no reason).
3) "Failed to send" sms users experience is bad (still testing on qk).
4) MMS sender ID almost always wrong (all messages in group MMS appear to be from the same person until you examine details).
5) Sending MMS with attachment/image always fails without verbose error (still testing qk)
This is pretty abysmal. Do I use the unmaintained app that fixes 3-5 of these issues, or the apparently actively developed one with all the warts? I guess this is the state of basic phone functionality in vendor-free, google-free android.
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if only they were open source, then anyone else could take over
Yeah it really shows why the GPL is necessary. "You can see this apps, and you can develop for them. But you can't use them on your own device ..." GPL explicitly demands that a method is provided to replace the binaries on devices that the software runs on. Which is one of the reasons the tech giants are so opposed to it. The other reason is cloud.
Most custom ROMs don't seem to use the AOSP dialer anyway. I've mostly seen forks with some nice features Google's dialer still lacks (call recording, for one). AOSP hasn't been a useful Android distribution for years. Luckily, you can make it useful through third party apps like the Simple apps: https://www.simplemobiletools.com/
Yeah, my first thought after reading the article was something like, "so I guess everyone will have to start grabbing phone/SMS apps out of F-Droid now". Annoying, but not that big of a deal, and I suspect the replacements will be better anyways. Worst case, the community and/or individual ROMs just fork the old AOSP versions, which has happened before as Google abandons things.
Theoretically you can run an AOSP GSI on your phone and yes then you do need to find apps on F-Droid, but I don't think anyone but ROM developers do that.
Has the author of this article ever used a custom ROM? There are so many free alternatives for these apps out there. If I remember correctly, LineageOS ships with their own version of Dialer/Messages anyway. I usually replace them with the versions of SimpleMobileTools, which work just fine. The main difficulty for custom ROMs are not these standard apps. The real issues are bootloaders which cannot be unlocked, undo…
After spelunking into the dialer source code a bit, it seems the important stuff related to receiving and initiating calls are already handled by android's TelecomManager and the dialer only provides interface for users to interact with TelecomManager. I haven't really dig into Messages source code these days, but a few years ago I was making an app that can send MMS messages and it was insane how much heavy lifting…
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QKSMS has a better interface than Simple SMS Messenger, but it's unmaintained, and for me, it had the same or worse problems with MMS than Simple SMS has.
It sure looks unmaintained! Here are my problems with Simple SMS that are fixed in QKSMS: 1) Long delay updating conversation after receiving a message (>5s). 2) Date sorting broken (old messages appearing at top of queue for no reason). 3) "Failed to send" sms users experience is bad (still testing on qk). 4) MMS sender ID almost always wrong (all messages in group MMS appear to be from the same person until you exa…
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It sure looks unmaintained! Here are my problems with Simple SMS that are fixed in QKSMS: 1) Long delay updating conversation after receiving a message (>5s). 2) Date sorting broken (old messages appearing at top of queue for no reason). 3) "Failed to send" sms users experience is bad (still testing on qk). 4) MMS sender ID almost always wrong (all messages in group MMS appear to be from the same person until you exa…
If only Signal hadn't dropped support for SMS/MMS... It was like a major selling point!
How can you call Android an open source mobile OS anymore given even these basic functions will be dropped?
Respectfully, I think you need to look closer and understand what AOSP actually is. It seems like your are mixing things up.