Signal, being owned by a nonprofit has a bit more resistance to that than most.
That’s the main reason I recommend it over alternatives with similar technical capabilities, such as WhatsApp.
Signal, being owned by a nonprofit has a bit more resistance to that than most.
That’s the main reason I recommend it over alternatives with similar technical capabilities, such as WhatsApp.
I’m guessing not a lot of users know about it. Their ActivityPub implementation is still only about half done.
It will be interesting to see of they promote it heavily when it’s more complete.
There’s nothing keeping them from scraping that kind of data now.
I’m not surprised they could. I’ve worked on things that send SMS messages and I’m aware that carriers filter for spam and scams (perhaps not as effectively as one might hope).
I’m surprised to hear of messages being blocked for mere profanity.
Anyway, SMS sucks, default to something else and fall back to SMS as a last resort. Gently encourage your contacts to use Signal.
SMS fallback. A feature which you can use with any app on Android
SMS fallback is not a common feature of internet-based messaging apps on Android. Signal used to do it, but does not now. I don’t think WhatsApp or Telegram ever did.
I have no doubt about the part where iPhone fans waste no opportunity to tell someone else they should get an iPhone. It’s the other side of the argument that falls flat: Alice receives video from Charlie that’s perfectly fine, but Bob’s iPhone sends a pixelated mess, and Bob says the iPhone is better?
Interest in RCS is recent - newer than iMessage, which launched in 2011. RCS with Google’s proprietary extensions is just another proprietary messaging app, and I am not particularly excited about it.
even so far as “patch” a fix that was created to make it possible for their customers to communicate securely with Android users.
There’s no shortage of options for doing that. What Apple wants is tight control over all of its walled gardens, which should be no surprise given the company’s history. They’re very good at making it appear as if decisions made to increase their profits are aligned with the interests of users. It’s probably even true that someone would have exploited the technique Beeper Mini was using to send spam if Apple hadn’t closed it.
Just doesn’t seem plausible to me. If Alice gets low-quality images from Bob and higher-quality images from Charlie, her most likely assumption if she’s not sophisticated enough to be aware of the cause is that Bob’s phone has a bad camera.
It seems unlikely to have that effect when the recipient presumably communicates with people who have other brands of phone, from whom they receive better looking media.
It seems like an odd decision to me, as it would make the iPhone look like it has a substandard camera to someone receiving media from one by MMS.
MMS does have size limits that can hurt image quality, but I have the impression iOS applies limits of its own that are considerably lower. I’m not sure why anybody in 2024 wouldn’t have at least a couple modern messaging apps, but it seems a lot of people don’t.
Android doesn’t support iMessage
I think it’s the inverse: iMessage doesn’t support Android.
Those aren’t equivalent statements; the first implies that something about Android makes it impossible for Apple to produce an iMessage client for it when that is purely a business decision on Apple’s part.
Major privacy issues that come to mind include:
would the government be able to find out that I own the anonymous e-sim on it if my other sim in my phone is another provider not silent-link
Yes. They can almost certainly tie the hardware ID (IMEI) of your phone to your identity through your non-anonymous service provider, and probably do through mass surveillance programs. Whether that’s a security problem for you depends on what you’re doing with it; surely you aren’t using SMS, standard phone calls, or unencrypted messaging services for anything you really want to keep private.
If you want phone service that will resist targeted surveillance by local authorities, even routinely turning on the cellular modem where you live, work, or study is a risk. This article detailing one person’s approach to securing a phone was posted to Lemmy today and should give you a clue about the possible threat models.
one with ads and the same vids without for premium user
If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn’t, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.
TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.
That’s a valid point, though it looks like Popfile’s installation instructions call for manually installing libraries, presumably current ones. I think it processes only text, not PDFs or images, which are traditional sources of vulnerabilities. I’m fairly certain it doesn’t attempt to execute Javascript. It is, itself written in Perl, which is memory-safe.
It’s worth considering security because there’s so much malware out there trying to spread indiscriminately, but Popfile is less vulnerable than an Android app (which bundles its dependencies) or anything written in C (which is subject to all kinds of memory management bugs).
Abandoned doesn’t necessarily imply no longer useful. Sometimes, though rarely in the modern world software is finished.
I may give it a try. It does actually have the features I’m asking for.
Not yet, but they’re actively developing ActivityPub support.
In Europe, businesses, especially small businesses often use WhatsApp, to the point of putting its logo next to their phone number on signs. I wonder what creates the perception where you are that messaging apps are for personal use, not business.