The battle is still there, and the GrapheneOS guy always bark at microG, like he really hates the whole concept of microG. What I have gotten from the discussion is that GrapheneOS is more secure, but although it sandboxes GPS denying some permissions, and some of those might be needed to be given away for some services any ways, it doesn’t try to fake anything, which microG does. In that sense my preference has been microG, and I don’t regret it.

That said, what you mentioned is true, both still access google app store, and still have to give some minimal information to google.

There’s a 3rd option the OP didn’t mentioned. If they are mainly interested in app store, and not the google services in general, there are a couple of somehow recognized 3rd party app store mirrors, which keep the same original signatures of the packages hosted by google app store, and they offer packages from other sources not provided by the google app store, in case interested on those packages: apkmirror and apkpure. From the two apkpure still allows to install and upgrade packages through FLOSS 3rd party apps like apkupdater, so that might be an option. For some months apkpure packages weren’t able to be installed through apkupdater, but it seems that got corrected already.

But in general, the OP would benefit from always looking for FLOSS packages on the F-Droid repo, then other non official F-Droid repos which can be used through the F-Droid app, then see if they can be installed from their web site and updated without intevention of any installer, and then if there’s no option but using proprietary software maybe looking for them on the apkpure/apkmirror sites or on apkpure through apkupdater or similar, and then aurora store, or if using grapheneOS finally google play if anything else fails, :)

I do understand the need for proprietary software, like bank OTP apps. It’s sad banks, governments, medical services and so on never look for FLOSS software, they always require users to get proprietary software. I don’t live in the EU, but I hope current hate/banning tendency ends up doing user a favor by starting to require banks, and the like to start using FLOSS apks, though doesn’t really helps me, I hope in the end it helps people in the EU.

Jami on desktop, not on phones yet:

https://jami.net/eleutheria

Available only for desktop users for now, the new Push-to-talk feature offers a new effortless way to communicate: simply press a button for hands-free, instant, and convenient audio messaging. It’s like in the olden days of gaming when gamers would key bind the Push to talk feature to be able to talk when necessary.

So jami all the way, 🙂

Monero?

Yeah, Librewolf by default doesn’t use DoT neither DoH, and so your IP is still exposed, but Librewolf had made it fairly easy to change through preferences or the librewolf overrides, whatever more convenient, as stated on its DoH enabling documentation.

Thanks !

Librewolf is a privacy oriented fork of Firefox, it grabs some setting from arkenfox. Betterbird is not a privacy oriented fork of Thunderbird as far as I remember. When I tried it the only thing I was attracted to was its tray support, but as I use non DE compositors, so far wayfire, labwc and sway (tabbed layout), and as there’s currently a Firefox bug, I didn’t see any reason to keep trying it, and now on sway with tabbed layout I see no reason for a tray any ways…

kixik

Well there’s already a browser on the works, verso, and it also attempts to make servo “embeddable”:

We aim to explore embedding solutions for Servo

Hopefully both project reach 1.0 sooner rather than later. Meanwhile there’s Librewolf at least, and there was Mull, but instead currently there’s IronFox and also FrozenFennec on the works as well, all forks of Firefox oriented to privacy.

see this other post: https://lemmy.ml/post/26518180/16957376

Hint, look at the date this gets pushed, :)

do you mean you use a more privacy oriented fork like Librewolf, or instead some chrome/chromium derivative or fork?

I don’t agree with what is written in that blog BTW, 1st I like that there’s a repo that at least tries as best as it can to protect the free software aspect of the apps, which many disregard but are pretty important to me, that’s one of the main values from f-droid for me. Proprietary binary components can include many invasive “features” one is not aware of. As requirement the source code and building from it is required. If you build from source, removing proprietary dependencies for example you’ll get a different binary, and that requires a new signature on the final package. F-droid has improved a lot on reproducible builds. And I’ve read in several places magnifying the issue of apks from official f-droid being moths later compared to original developer release, my own experience is different, and when I’ve written, I immediately get a reaction from someone which doesn’t agree with me (I never reply back). I’ve read about the single entity signature, but that alone should not be an issue, otherwise we would be distrusting packages from debian, arch, and so on, which use a set of signatures to sign all of their packages, particularly when the build and signing process is automated, in some distros most packages come signed by the same bot. The issue about using a VM with a LTS distro about to expire or already expired is a valid one, but can you blame them when migrating breaks their flows and they don’t have enough hands, and that got overcome any ways. Now a days things are working fine AFAIK. That the clients support multiple repos violate an android policy, oh well, I don’t care much about android policies, and google for that matter, which collects a ton of data from users and people forgets about what that means, but what a bad practice not to follow those policies.

I believe some people really dislike free software, which is not the same as open source, one really need to value the four basic freedoms it procures, and if one doesn’t give a dumb for whatever reason then one doesn’t really appreciate free software, perhaps all one wants is not paid software, which is not the same. Free has two meanings and people often gets confused, and f-droid is about free software. It’s true they can’t guarantee every single bit of their content, but they trying through their policies and a few scripts has value to me, and taking a look at what free software meaning and the basic freedoms it looks to preserve is important to be understood before complaining about an organization trying to offer free software. It would be more appropriate if the terminology changes to use the spanish “libre” word instead, but it is what it is, that why sometimes FOSS is instead referred as FLOS (free/libre or free and libre). And true, as a result developers who want to provide apks through f-droid and also through non free software app stores or repos (whatever makes more sense) need to have in place something to account for the differences, and that’s not optimal, but there’s a good reason for it, but some developers just don’t want to do it and even less not depending on android proprietary stuff or other proprietary stuff for that matter, which is their prerogative any ways.

A little rant of mine, not we all have to agree over the same arguments I guess.

Well, it is available on the IzzyOnDroid separate f-droid repo, so if using the f-droid client, you can still grab freetubeAndroid with it.

Never tried it though, and not sure how bloated for a phone, but it’s easy to install/update with any f-droid client.

ohh, as I set sponsorblock for it some time back, I thought it also did it, but it does not.

Tubular and Libretube (both available on f-droid btw)

Well, to me xmpp is the way to go, but I guess it’s not a matter of opinion, but rather understanding the motivation.

Why is your dad looking for telegram? What caused your dad to look into it? Perhaps digging into those, one can make a case with alternative more private options. For sure one can always argue in general the already mentioned alternatives, and the ones to come are better privacy wide, but it boils down to why is him looking to use telegram. If it’s about having friends or co-workers, or a high school set of friends there, I would think there’s no way to change his mind, :( But more technology arguments like stickers, better voice/video conferences, whatever, then that’s more something that can be argued I would think, the same way if he’s just looking for something more private of course.

I second xmpp + omemo, and would caution that as far as I can remember matrix leaks significant metadata when syncing between instances/services.

As a personal decision I got away from signal (molly in fact) more than a year ago.

I’m also keep jami working with my family, particularly for things not requiring immediate response. It’s a different beast, since it’s p2p, but there’s no server associated to it, no matter if decentralized or not. It’s easy as well, just not as responsive, in particular if looking for immediate responses… I like and keep both, hoping jami improves.

Phoenix is not a browser, is it? AFAIK it’s a similar user.js to Arkenfox… They claim to be better, and have their on comparison, but I don’t know:

https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix/wiki/Comparison

Arkenfox has been like the default user.js for privacy… Perhaps phoenix already is better…

Regarding omemo, dino is getting there, see its closed issue 1609. Not sure why it has taken them too long for a new release, but they have the stuff already merged.

I’m interested on what changed that make it differ from Mull in a non recommended way. Are you referring to their 1st MR? where they outline:

• Replaced Arkenfox & Brace preferences with ones from Phoenix 2025.01.06.1…
• Added support for Google Safe Browsing (Safe Browsing is disabled by default and can be enabled by setting the following preferences to true in about:config)

I understand Mull was using arkenfox which is sort of the go-to reference, and now ironfox move to phoenix. The safe browsing is the same approach Librewolf follows, though I don’t like their comment on a proxy. I don’t like their choice of the brave search engine, but I always replace that with searxng tweaked a bit.

The MR doc doesn’t look too terrible, but don’t know about the changes themselves.

As mentione SMS is by no means secure, and although silence hadn’t gotten any update, still works as a champ on Android 15.

https://gitlab.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox/-/issues/7

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/issues/3457

Ohh, so it changed for being webkit, to be a FF based browser. At any rate Librewolf keep being like the closest, FF but with better defaults, and without the need to configure the arkenfox stuff.

It’s a webkit engine based browser, actually it uses webkitgtk. Now webkit is the engine on which safari (apple) is based as well, and it’s been there for some time. blink, which is what chromium based browsers use, is a fork from webkit with its own extras.

So it all depends, chromium based browsers are all blink engine based browsers, which are pretty related to webkit engine based browsers (midori is not the only one BTW). As well as there are a ton of blink based utilities such the electron ones (chromium in disguise), there are still quite a bit based on webkit, specially gtk applications.

gecko as opposed to the other major web engines never had some sort of toolkit that would make it easier for other applications than the mozilla ones to be based on it, and it seems there will never be such toolkit, even less with the dominance of blink based browsers and applications, and in a lesser way but still high use webkit applications and browsers.

If looking for actual alternatives to what dominates the market, I believe gecko is the option at the moment, and if the FF defaults are unsane, I’d strongly suggest using Librewolf, which is essence is FF with much better defaults, it partially uses arkenfox configs, but it’s independent and has its own decisions, and also removes very few blobs like pocket at build time.

Eventually servo might become the web engine to look for, and perhaps verso the web browser based on servo. But they are still in early stages as to be considered for day to day regular use. I’m not sure if servo is both a web engine and also offers itself as a toolkit so other applications besides a web browser can be based on it, similar to webkit or blink, but I believe that’s not the case, at least not yet, though I wouldn’t put my hands on fire for this, :).

Bottom line, you might want to take a look at Librewolf.

Unfortunately divestOS is retiring, and Mull, something like Librewolf but for AOSP based devices, has ceased development. I’m really hoping someone capable of forking it does it…

Totally unrelated, mull is pretty cool in the sense that it brings arkenfox configs for the user, and it strips some binary blobs. To me the AOSP privacy browser with no actual alternative. Some say it’s like librewolf for AOSP.

Bottom line, no, totally different things.

Yet Another Call Blocker?

They don’t, I mean registering your username/basename is not a requirement, they chose the registration as the default to make it easier to be found. But you can get away with not registering your username/basename and instead exchange with your contacts you ID number, and with that besides able to choose whatever username/basename, there’s no central directory to find you, which is good depending on your use case, but the Jami guys are right to say that makes it virtually impossible for others to find you and establish a conversation unless you exchanged somehow your ID numbers, but that’s not actually finding, :)

That option is a one time choosing, when creating the account though.

It is open source, which is good, but ultimately it depends on the service provider as usual, what it logs and for how long. The good thing, is that by design there’s not much which can be collected.

But for a mechanism that is supposed p2p distributed, unified push, their proxy stuff (which also helps reduce battery usage), make the app not such p2p, but the gain in battery life might be your priority. DHT is as well a point of gathering several connections, and also to collect metadata, but to be honest, DHT is so good for this purpose, that I don’t complain.

The thing is that on the phone by default you don’t get a pure p2p experience, which is BTW really hard, as requiring both ends being present if pure p2p, and it’s really hard to actually contact the other end at any time. Although if wanted, jami can be configured as such, except by the DHT part I believe.

wow:

We use specifically crafted messages that trigger delivery receipts allowing any user to be pinged without their knowledge or consent

That makes think that 1st, perhaps it would be a good idea to avoid “return receipts” on any messenger, though that breaks ability to know if the destination has actually received, and if the destination has actually read the message.

Perhaps another thing, even though your messenger doesn’t identify users with phone numbers at all, still block the messenger to have access to your contact list. Not sure if this affects, for example if a xmpp client has access to a broader contact list, if it can only relate to xmpp addresses it wouldn’t pay attention to phone numbers, but I can’t really tell.

And of course, don’t use any messenger which tights users with phone numbers, no matter if to share among contacts now usernames are used instead of the phone number, when the phone number is still the way to identify the user.

True, but not entirely, signature spoofing needs OS support, and LOS and divestOS don’t, whereas murenaOS (/e/OS) and lineageOS for microG do. Other than that microG’s own f-droid repo makes it easy to keep microG’s component up to date.

That’s why I mentioned it would be nice to upstream divestOS bootloader lock/unlock at will solution, so that not just LOS, but derivative ROMs can inherit that solution. As some people don’t like the tight integration from murena (/e/) with all of its rebranding, LOS for microG is a very appealing option, if wanting full microG’s support. Actually LOS for microG was there quite before /e/ was created.

That’s great if not having to use any proprietary apps depending on google services, including push notifications, since part of divestos unsupported stuff includes:

Google Apps or microG or Sandboxed Play Services are NOT supported.

Which is fine, if you don’t need to use such apps. An alternative to /e/os, which now a days is actually murenaOS, is lineageOS for micro G, which does sort of monthly releases based on whatever is available as nightly releases on lineageOS. It does provide you with microG and also with F-Droid with privileged extensions installed and already set for you. This might be more suitable than divestos if in need for some such apps.

Yup, divestOS allows for booloader lock though unfortunately they don’t support microG. I hope they somehow help upstream their relock solution to LOS. I use LOS for microG instead, since I need stupid bank apps and also for the office some stupid proprietary multi factor authentication apps… If only LOS for microG could lock the bootloader at will (it needs to be unlocked for major upgrades, like on regular LOS), that’d be great.

There’s as well CalyxOS, which uses microG and also locks the bootloader, however I do prefer LOS since the strategy from CalyxOS and GrapheneOS trying to deGoogle pure Android in my mind sound like having some limitations, as opposed to LOS approach to be based on AOSP instead. Though that’s just in my mind, I’m sure those guys in Calyx and Graphene are the best at security and privacy.

Just so you know you can get push notifications on Jami. Jami has been supporting unified push notification for a while now, but it’s opt-in, some might not opt for it considering reducing privacy a bit, as some actually disable the proxy and some phone specific feature intending to prevent battery exhausting too fast.

For unified push support you can take a look at jami’s article about its unified push support. I use ntfy BTW.

Perhaps a misinterpretation from mojeek’s wiki:

Mojeek also displays significantly more individual entries in its search results than Google or Bing

Are you sure the phone it doesn’t work on is older than android 7? According to its f-droid jami URL its latest version as well as two more also documented there, they all work on android 7 or later.

I use LOS4uG, and I’m currently on android 14, so no need to build jami myself. Can you enable “unstable updates” on f-droid’s “expert mode”? Perhaps then you get latest app, and that one works better. Otherwise you can report an issue to the android client, and perhaps you get guidance from them. You can also use their forum to ask questions. I have filed issues only so far.

dino is a gnu+linux software, built with gtk4. If you’re using windows then the option is gajim, which in order to support omemo needs a plugin, though I can’t tell much more than that about it since I can’t even recall when was the last time I used windows.

That said, conversations has one important setting if syncing devices, which is indicating that the client won’t delete messages, the server will. Not sure why that is not the default, I guess statistically most xmpp users just make use of conversations and that’s it. The other important setting is configuring security for omemo always. Dino doesn’t need any setting for letting the server delete messages (it does when there’s no pending device to be synced) and doesn’t offer that option, and at the moment the user must be careful and set each conversation to be secured by omemo with no exceptions, but it’s already merged on master, and waiting for a new release, the option for omemo always, as on conversations.

That said, using xmpp doesn’t imply not having jami installed and keep trying it. Who knows, maybe you like it and it works fine for your purpose, and you decide for it to be you main messenger application.

I do !

works pretty well on both AOSP phones and gnu+linux desktops. Sad thing though is that I don’t like using flatpak, and I prefer distro native built software, and on Artix/Arch, there are times where the version between the distro version is slightly outdated with regards to the mobile version, and that makes things not to work. This is mainly an issue ever since jami decided to stop supporting the gtk client on the desktop, to me the qt experience have been sad. Not sure if someone has forked the gtk client, that would be great.

So I’m using xmpp as my main messenger, and keep trying jami when it works.

I really like the p2p approach from jami, and also the way they care for those with no huge batteries phones, given they added support for unified push notifications, which can be of course avoided if required for extra privacy. Given my use case, I can’t turn jami into my main messenger yet, but I keep trying, :) Meanwhile xmpp is there for me.

Is it something you have to trust they comply with what they say?

Nice that it has its own indexes, but according to this comparison its proprietary SW, running on UK servers without tor interface, and being backed or debated at least by UK politicians. We’re not talking about a not for profit organization either, and they do have individualized answers as well, so they have the mechanisms to individualize results to queries, meaning they keep information about your queries. So in the end, it boils down to the user trusting its service it seems.

Yes, meta search engines do not provide their own indexes, but searxNG is at least open source, you can select the search engines to use, included mojeek, and they serve as a front end preventing the underneath engine to track you (whether it’s against their public policy or not) as if you were to use such engine directly.

Not on conversations, and soon not on dino either. Not sure about others, those are the ones I use and like.

Conversation let you configure that all conversations are omemo secure by default (omemo always). Dino’s next release will include it as well (omemo always issue)

Actually xmpp is low on metadata compared to matrix which has to replicate a bunch of metadata everywhere. SimpleX look interesting, though by not being federated (considered by simpleX a privacy feature) whether you like their client or not. Just so you know privacyguides has explained why they don’t advertise xmpp as privacy oriented, and the reason is not that it isn’t, it’s simply that given it’s federated, they consider some clients are not as compliant or up to date, which is up to the user to select on XMPP, and also up to the user to file bugs against their preferred client or even contribute it with changes.

Not a hurricane tracker, but I’d like understand a bit about open-meteo and breezy weather. I notice for my country there’s no way to be more specific than the whole country, therefore location needs to be enable, or so I guess.

Does open-meteo requires some information exchange such that it’s easy to identify the user/device? Does breezy weather actually attempts to anonymize the user or fake it to make them non identifiable?

Just wondering.

Thanks !