Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackbravo | Hacker News Reader

Lack of GCM was one of their primary reasons for not providing an APK for TextSecure for users who don't use Google Play (like users with CyanogenMod).

- https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127 - http://support.whispersystems.org/customer/portal/articles/1...

Hopefully that option will be available soon.

View on HN

They will still rely on GCM for the wakeup event so I don't see why it'd make any difference. Presumably the plan is that TextSecure will store the messages and when the app is open, it will build its own connection to the TextSecure servers until the app shuts down. But eliminating GCM entirely would mean the app must run all the time, understand how to handle the NAT timeouts and the servers would need to handle millions of simultaneous TCP connections - a tall order.

This is especially true because GCM is treated specially by lots of telcos and they won't time out GCM sessions automatically. TextSecure wouldn't benefit from that.

whatsapp and fb messenger work perfectly without google play services installed. whatsapp even manages to update itself. i see no reason why TextSecure could not do it. It's an app that is focused on privacy, and as such should work without closed source software from the largest data collector in the world installed on the phone.

Facebook and WhatsApp are much bigger players with massive infrastructure that Whisper Systems doesn't have.

I agree it would be a lot better if it didn't require Google Play Services, but I'm not sure how realistic that is. Google has worked hard to make the Play APIs indispensable for anyone trying to work with Android.

This. TextSecure is a tiny player that's already had a tremendously outsized impact. It's completely unrealistic to expect them to be able to support every edge case and provide as smooth an experience as these billion dollar companies can.

TextSecure and their Open Whisper Systems' involvement in Whatsapp have done more for the adoption of end-to-end encrypted peer to peer communication than the combination of just about anything else that could be brought up as a contributing factor. When they say that SMS is a net hurdle to adoption, then I trust their judgement on that count.

> Facebook and WhatsApp are much bigger players with massive infrastructure that Whisper Systems doesn't have.

even kik (http://www.kik.com/) works without google play services, and it has no massive infrastructure.

but even then, it makes no sense to say that chatsecure is secure and client side encrypted, when it NEEDS, and BUILDS ON closed source software of (one of) the largest data collector companies in the world.

It's been interesting to see the decline in GCM performance since the launch of Textsecure v2 in 2013. Dropped and delayed Textsecure messages have gone from rare to routine in the Bay Area. At 31c3, I learned the WispherPush has been near unusable for many Europeans from the get go.

Looking forward to dropping the GCM requirement.

It's cognitively dissonant not to read GCM not as Galois Counter Mode in a crypto discussion.

I'm one of those people who used to use text secure, but didn't like installing google or cyanogenmon on my phone. So I would always have to self compile, but gave up recently cause I don't have any friends to text secure with :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com