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Comment by sinak | Hacker News Reader

For any other non-profits or companies who might need a similar app to notify users, both the app (Cordova + Ionic) and the APNS/GCM push notification server are open source and available here:

https://github.com/EFForg/pushserver

https://github.com/EFForg/actioncenter-mobile

If you're an Android user, consider downloading the app. Its really, really simple - it just sends you a push notification if there's an action EFF needs your help with - but we hope to improve it over time.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.eff.action...

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Honestly, the play store is not any better than the apple app store.

I myself never agreed to the play store's license agreement and use my android phone without it.

If you really care about privacy, consider hosting your apps apk yourself or post it to a store that really respects its users privacy, like f-droid instead of supporting the play store. If your app is opensource like you state, f-droid should host it.

Take care, Martin

I agree with your sentiments about privacy and f-droid, but must nit-pick your statement:

> Honestly, the play store is not any better than the apple app store.

Both stores fail at certain criteria, but by other criteria the Google Play store is actually far, far better than the app store.

Can this be installed without the Play Store?

My understanding is that you need to have the Play Store on your device for apps to register and receive push notifications from GCM [1]. Since that's the main functionality of the app at the moment, an APK for sideloading won't be too useful, but perhaps we can add one once we add more functionality?

[1] Would love to be wrong about this if anyone else knows differently.

Unfortunately that looks to be the case. I had hoped they'd rolled their own push server implementation in the linked source (https://github.com/EFForg/pushserver), but it's just a wrapper around the GCM and APNS services.

It's disappointing, because both Android and iOS have support for periodically retrieving data without using the proprietary push services. It's not like the EFF is going to be delivering messages that have a 'real-time' requirement and therefore require a persistent connection (as opposed to say, Gmail/Hangouts).

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