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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a pinephone, I think there needs to be solid development put into two things:

1. Phone calls need to consistently work

2. Signal needs to handle texts

I plan on contributing when I have a tad more time, but I’d actually use the phone full time if it could make and receive calls without error. Can’t do that yet.

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Signal only exists officially as an Android app and, for desktop, an Electron app that is not adapted for a small mobile screen at all. The PinePhone community has no say in these two pieces of software, and Signal's devs are strongly opposed to anyone creating third-party Signal clients. So, this is out of the PinePhone community's control. There is also the option of running Signal over the Android emulator Anbox, but that is very RAM- and processor-heavy, and the PinePhone has very weak, underpowered hardware.

For a handful of unusually dedicated nerds, it does look like maybe one can set up signal-cli on the phone (which, again, is not an official Signal client and disapproved of by Signal's devs), but this is not a full-featured, polished solution.

"Signal's devs are strongly opposed to anyone creating third-party Signal clients."

Hmm, that might have been the case. There was that famous blog post from 2016 about no third-party clients. That has never been retracted, but they got so much flac over it that they seemingly changed their mind. What I hear from the developers of Whisperfish for Sailfish OS is that the people from Signal are quite helpfull in bringing that app towards a good functioning client.

Also, there are laws being worked on in Europe that popular platforms will have to allow third-party clients, not much different from the web and its browsers. The Digital Markets Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

I would recommend https://gitlab.com/signald/signald these days. Works quite stable. I use it with https://github.com/thefinn93/signal-weechat

Don't forget Axolotl[0], an unofficial client for Ubuntu Touch that has been unofficially packaged up for Debian (and that package can in turn be installed with a PKGBUILD script on Arch and Manjaro). A working official client would be a lot better though.

[0] https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl

The problem with Axolotl and signald mentioned in another comment here, is that they don't have a very strong reputation for security like the official Signal apps.

I may be wrong, but I think anbox is not an emulator per se, it is more similar to how wine works. So it should not have too extreme overhead.

In practice however Anbox is slow as hell on the PinePhone.

Unfortunately, in practice everything is quite slow on the pinephone.

(But I don’t want to sound so negative, it is a wonderful project and the advances in the last year is fantastic. Unfortunately the amount of RAM, and sort of old hardware doesn’t help)

> Phone calls need to consistently work

On my Android 10 phone they don't anymore, and nobody cares. I guess we're over the whole "using smartphones for phone calls" thing now.

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