Signal itself works, but since Google is blocked no phones are sold with Google Play Store and even if you hack it onto your phone (which will break when it wants to update play services) it will drain your battery trying to connect to blocked services. Unless you use vpn (which will drain battery by itself and also eventually be blocked), but notifications probably still won't work because of the phones original firmware. So yes it works if you hack it onto your phone and then remove play services and checks the application manually. Until it wants to update the app that is, which is often.

Point. It doesn't really work because it only supports the Google Play Store, even as most Chinese phones can load apps directly (because of the fragmented ecosystem). So at least it doesn't work in the "prevent mass surveillance" way.

I guess maybe it works from the Apple App Store? (which isn't blocked)

I reproduce here the dead message from "uola" I think the message deserves a proper response and not to be flagged.

"Signal itself works, but since Google is blocked no phones are sold with Google Play Store and even if you hack it onto your phone (which will break when it wants to update play services) it will drain your battery trying to connect to blocked services. Unless you use vpn (which will drain battery by itself and also eventually be blocked), but notifications probably still won't work because of the phones original firmware. So yes it works if you hack it onto your phone and then remove play services and checks the application manually. Until it wants to update the app that is, which is often.

Point. It doesn't really work because it only supports the Google Play Store, even as most Chinese phones can load apps directly (because of the fragmented ecosystem). So at least it doesn't work in the "prevent mass surveillance" way.

I guess maybe it works from the Apple App Store? (which isn't blocked)"

The person you are communicating with.

What you have described is pretty much an opposite of how F-droid works. One can't just take binary (whether official or compromised) and upload it there. [1]

Instead, to publish an app there, you need to provide source code repository [2], and their build farm would build it, sort-of [3] providing guarantee that source code you can inspect is the same one you got running on your phone.

[1] There are exceptions, i.e. apps uploaded as binary-only (for example Firefox), but those come with big red warning that user sees before installing them.

[2] https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/FAQ_-_App_Developers#Will_my_a...

[3] Sort-of because reproducible builds for Android not here yet, so you can't just rebuilt it yourself and compare sha256, unfortunately.

So actually, the only thing he could do is to publish a validated binary into F-droid.

Here I copy the "dead" message from "uola":

"Yes, phone numbers are public enough that they are shared everywhere, but unique enough to lead to a single person not to speak of that persons movements. And "just use twilio" isn't a motivation for using phone numbers in the first place.

If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion, but now he's seemingly saying "oh, if you really care about privacy you could/should use a fake phone number"."

---

Personally, I don't know how "a fake phone number" setup can be implemented, especially in the countries where each phone number is assigned to one ID at the time of purchase, so to me "use a fake phone number" sounds like "let them eat cake."

Yes, phone numbers are public enough that they are shared everywhere, but unique enough to lead to a single person not to speak of that persons movements. And "just use twilio" isn't a motivation for using phone numbers in the first place.

If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion, but now he's seemingly saying "oh, if you really care about privacy you could/should use a fake phone number".