If you'd rather not pay the Beeper Cloud service is free and all of the matrix bridges it uses are open source.
The source code behind how Beeper Mini works is available as well but will require a client of some sort to be written since you can't just use a matrix bridge and a matrix app.
The guy who started Beeper also created the Pebble Watch and they have always maintained open source alternatives for their bridges.
I'm just happy that a company with those ethics is the one to take up this fight against Apple, this could have been a $10/month app from a company who believes in closed source and pushing ads/tracking users' data.
Beeper is a good company that actually cares about privacy and security and that should be commended.
Same thing that's been in the news about some sharing info with police. The comment of the messages are ete encrypted but notifications of who is talking to who is not
Beeper Mini's GCM server only handles a "new message waiting" trigger, it doesn't contain any private data like who the message is from or its contents, just that a new message is available.
I wasn't saying Signal required them necessarily, just that even it uses them. But now reading back through my comment I can see how that could be easily misinterpreted. My bad
That's cool, but also doesn't sound all that useful.
A fairly significant number of apps depends on Firebase and the like and don't even have the option to pull notifications otherwise. And virtually every app at least use them.
When's the last time you've seen a chat app that didn't require push notifications to function? Even Signal uses them. (Though they do so in a way that doesn't expose any private data)
You just can't disable push without severely crippling the experience.
Further I'm not even sure disabling them on-device will change anything at all about governments being able to surveil them server-side. Afaik you are only stopping your phone from receiving them, they would still be sent to the Firebase server from the app's cloud servers.
I don't think this issue is avoidable other than app developers not using (or using in a secure manner) Firebase or GCM (or ACM) etc
Sandboxed GooglePlay services can be used, if needed.
I don't see how that would prevent this at all.
What is being discussed here is governments compromising the push notification service on Apple's servers (and presumably Google's as well)
Sandboxing Google services on your phone does nothing to change the fact that virtually all apps that receive messages/notifications are going to be using the push notification APIs that are compromised.
Whether or not private data is sent in those pushes and whether or not they are encrypted is up to the app developers.
It's common for push messages to simply be used as a triggering mechanism to tell the device to download the message securely so much of what is compromised in those cases will simply be done metadata or even just "a new message is available"
But even so, that information could be used to link your device to data they acquired using other methods based on the timing of the push and subsequent download or "pull"
The problem is that if you go ahead and disable push notifications/only use apps that allow you to, you are going to have abysmal battery life and an increase in data use because your phone will have to constantly ping cloud servers asking if new messages/notifications are available.
Running BlueBubbles at the moment, eagerly awaiting someone to build a self hosted implementation of this so I can stop relying on my macos VM.
Beeper Mini does not require a Mac VM or any Apple products. There's no cloud proxy to self host. It registers your phone number directly with Apple's servers, you don't even need an AppleID at all, just like on an iPhone.
It's indistinguishable from an iPhone on Apple's end and your iMessage encryption keys never leave your phone
When's the last time you loaded windows and sound didn't work out of the gate?
I had trouble getting Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Zero Dawn, and BG3 to open at all on Windows at various times.
All of them work great for me on Linux.
I think 99% of my issues with Windows were due to Windows Updates messing with my drivers but the point is I don't have those problems on Linux. You never hear about Linux forcing updates that break your system.
Yeah I mean if the game you want to play doesn't work then maybe Linux isn't for you, at least not at this time.
Not saying you have to switch.
Just that my personal experience with it has been very good, better than I expected, and way better than my previous experience not long ago.
As others have mentioned, you can check the status of your preferred games on websites like ProtonDB beforehand, you don't have to format your Windows drive and install Linux before finding out if your games will work.
