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GrapheneOS is building its own RCS support to cut Google Messages out of the picture (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/android@lemdro.id
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[–] 190 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Good. Everything Google touches needs to be forked.

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  • [–] 83 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    Fork Google

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    • [–] 128 points 2 months ago (20 children)

    2 weeks now on Graphene. This is what a phone OS should be, simple, boring, juste the basics without a shit-ton of bloatware and spying crap.

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  • [–] 33 points 2 months ago (18 children)

    This has been available since forever, though. Cyanogenmod/LineageOS was the biggest. Oneplus followed along and I love my OP15, though that's coming to a bitter end

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago

    Cyanogenmod and LineageOS have always felt like hacks upon hacks and always had something broken. While I have my gripes with GOS it's truly the first time since I have had a custom ROM that just works through and through.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    My pixel 7 broke but am still getting a OP15 becasue I can't stand google shit anymore, even paid an $150 for it. I figure the hardware isnt going to get better and OP15 is probably the best its gonna get for a few years anyways.

    Insane that google can sell such an inferior product for the same or greater price.

    So sad that OP15 wont get a reboot. These phones are the last bit of the pre-surveillance era.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    Lineage pales in comparison to what cyanogenmod was

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Having used both extensively, what? I've seen very little difference between the two, and if anything Lineage has become more refined and stable compared to Cyanogen over the years.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (3 children)

    The CM theme manager alone was leagues better than anything Lineage is doing these days. CM enabled things like 720p recording on Nexus One, before the stock camera. Hacked in multitouch on devices that didn't properly support it. Features like the camera flashlight we take for granted today. The notification shade quick menus. Hell the majority of the android UI/UX was pioneered on Cyanogenmod, it's actually insane how much customizability and custom features that were available. Then it got gobbled up by AOSP and/or PixelOS and dumbed down for end users. Remember touchwiz? There's a reason Cyanogen got picked up by Samsung. Their android builds are actually good now. To the point that I prefer a lot of their UX flows over stock. If you told me that in 2013 I would have laughed in your face.

    I daily drove Lineage for 2 years and honestly couldn't name a single feature it provided me other than root access and failing Google's play integrity checks + breaking my tap to pay.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    Cyanogen had nothing to do with why Samsung's interface improved and why OneUI is good now. He was at Samsung for less than two years and it was during the TouchWiz era. He left Samsung and almost immediately trashed TouchWiz on the S4. I loved CyanogenMod, but OneUI (and Samsung Experience before it) was forced by the competition's Android skins getting better, not custom ROMs. So, I agree with everything else you said though.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    It kind of sounds like you looked up a wikipedia article about Cyanogenmod looking for any claimed feature to try to make it sound like it's better. Neverminding how dubious and revisionist your claims are (apps were doing camera flashlight long before Cyan, and using any of them was a bad idea because they'd burn the light out, for instance).

    None of that matters, because what it comes down to is that Cyanogenmod doesn't exist anymore. It was abandoned, and at least Lineage is something I can use now. It's one of the few options still around that allows me some relative piece of mind knowing my devices are free of spyware, and it continues getting ported to more devices than pretty much any other Android based system.

    Also, I have a Samsung phone. Their UX sucks, way too bloated and messy.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    These are literally just features that I used and went out of my way to seek out lmao. I still have my Nexus One and the camera LED is still working. Glad you think my 15 year old memories are encyclopedic though

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Lineage was forked from the remains of CM. Without Lineage, CM would have died and faded from memory already.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    This is what a phone OS should be

    Quite literally how my wife puts it. She's been using Graphene on a Pixel 9 Pro XL for a few months now. Even with the hurdles of moving to an entirely different platform and the weirdness that comes with the extra security (not playing nice with some services), she vastly prefers it over her previous Apple stuff, to the point she wants me to wipe MacOS off of her iMac and install Linux.

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    • [–] 68 points 2 months ago (16 children)

    I hope it's functionally installable on other versions of android

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    I hope it can finally bring this piece of shit messaging protocol to Linux phones so my friends and family know when I read a message

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Just move them to signal :)

    πŸ™ 1
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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    i can barely get them to move off of telegram πŸ₯€οΈ

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    My immediate family is on signal, and has been for a while, my parents and my sibling are now on signal which is nice!

    I have a few others I communicate with often I wish I could get them over because I hate using sms, even rcs.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)
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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    you do realise that rcs only works on unrooted stock google-certified android with a locked bootloader? that't the whole reason grapheneos is making their own FOSS implementation

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    rcs only works on unrooted stock google-certified android with a locked bootloader

    Uh no? It literally works on GrapheneOS. https://grapheneos.org/usage#rcs

    I think you're confusing this with Google Pay, which only works on Google-certified systems.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    The waydroid devs said not to use way droid for anything security related. This is bad advice.

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    • [–] 55 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    For those who got too excited by the title: read the original messages from the GrapheneOS. RCS de-facto is not an open technology, there's a massive amount of work and multiple steps are needed to get anywhere near the proper independent implementation. It's gonna be amazing if the GrapheneOS team pulls it off, but don't get too excited about the release dates and its availability for other systems (e.g. Linux).

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    To be honest, I'd rather they use the effort elsewhere (as a very happy gOS user). The number of people on gOS who wouldn't prefer Signal (without phone number rego) / Threema etc. is probably vanishingly small, but that takes going up against the incumbents with heavy resistance.

    There's only so many irons you can keep in the fire. That said, gOS devs (sans drama) are freaking awesome, and seems to keep growing in number, if they can pull it off it will be a true coup.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago

    That's true on one hand, but on the other there are also family and friends with who we still want/need to communicate via the "normies" protocols, and it's better to do it without explicit spyware on your phone (aka Play Services or Whatsapp). So yeah, it's an absolutely ungrateful work what they're doing, but huge thanks to them for that.

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    • [–] 37 points 2 months ago* (15 children)

    As a basic sms user, is RCS the reason my conversations now sometimes get flooded with messages like, "so-and-so loved this"?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    iMessages does that when it falls back to SMS.

    Google Messages works around it by manually parsing the message and adding the emoji to the message like iMessage does.

    So Apple caused the problem, and only Google Messages accommodates for it afaik.

    In a proper RCS chat that won't happen as Apple and Google will send the reactions natively.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (9 children)

    If you're on Android, the Textra app handles most of the emojis on messages without needing RCS. Sadly it still doesn't work with reactions to images yet.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    Looks like scamware, only available on Play Store, and it doesn't look like it's open-source. I wouldn't go near that.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Why? You aren't confortable with a random guy developing an app having access to your conversations or to your 2FA codes from your bank?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Textra was the go-to SMS app for quite a while in the enthusiast community. I don't know what happened to it in the last few years though.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Quik, an open source SMS app on FDroid, handles this already without needing a specific OSes RCS.

    Unless there is something fundamental thats wrong with Quik and its development, I dont see why one would be excited about another vendor specific solution. Quik works on any degoogled android, not just Graphene.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I might try Quik again at some point, but to be honest I don't care enough about sms messaging apps to go beyond the default one usually. I think I remember I stopped using Quik because at least at the time it didn't have link previews, which is a hell of a lot more convenient to me than emoji react buttons.

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    • [–] 134 points 2 months ago (33 children)

    The number of Europeans in here acting like What's App, which might as well be Facebook Messenger, is some sort of high road is hilarious.

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  • [–] 66 points 2 months ago (30 children)

    Yeah I still don't get why people use or promote WhatsApp. If anything, use Signal or even Telegram

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  • [–] 34 points 2 months ago (17 children)

    I have thought this for years. Everyone slimes on Americans for using iMessage and asks who no WhatsApp? Same reason I’m not on facebook, don’t use a meta quest, and don’t use instagram.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (14 children)

    While Whatsapp is not great, the problem with iMessage is that it is (was?) locked exclusively to the apple platform

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (13 children)

    Yeah, thats the main issue with imessage (and it still is) and if your switching from IOS to android, you have to start over on all of your messages unless if you figure out a way to back them up.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (12 children)

    It's not a good solution, but from a meme in c/selfhosting i learned that through the price of a used mac mini (about $120 at that time) you can selfhost iMessage on mac, and selfhost a 3rd party free software called Bluebubbles, which, as far as i can tell, uses Google and Cloudflare services to convey the iMessages to your Android phone.

    I'm sure it is a privacy nightmare. But the shunning for not having iMessage from my own family was getting to me, real or imagined.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    You're not self-hosting iMessage. It's just a bridge between your device and Apple's iMessage network.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    You are self hosting iMessage -- you have a machine you own (mac mini) running the iMessage application 24-7, so you can access it on your own client (Android phone).

    It's self hosting a proprietary service with some middleware to access it on the device of your choosing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    That is just so overly complicated, i would rather just start them over🀣🀣

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    I’ve never had a problem starting over. Used to custom ROM hope back in the day and start with a fresh Android release on the cyanogenmod nightly releases.

    There is nothing in my iMessage that I would be sad to lose moving to Android.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

    What do you mean exactly start over? If you don't have iMessage, you can't talk to other people with iMessage.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (3 children)

    Yeah, its basically that. When i moved from IMessage to Google Message(this was before i went down the FOSS rabbit hole), you have to remake your group chats or someone who is your contact would have to send a text that makes you rejoin a group chat even though you no longer see any of your old messages. One of the biggest annoyances from Apple, its way to locked down to the point that you cant even export your messages, unless its with another apple device.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (2 children)

    OK that makes sense. My family excluded me from group chats while i was using Google messages. I couldn't convince them to change. So i eventually broke down and bought the mac mini rather than get an i phone

    Hopefully yours are more tolerant

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Google messages and IMessages at this point are literally the same thing. They both use RCS, just on different platforms. Unless your family really like Apple, it shouldnt have been a problem.

    My folks were really chill about the change until i decided to go the degoogle route. Texting started to become an issue, and im trying to tell anyone that i text to go to Delta Chat. So far, some of my family are using it. But for others, i know its gonna be an issue.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    You can't use Signal or Telegram because your contacts are on WhatsApp, but yes WhatsApp might as well be called Facebook Messenger

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Your contacts weren't always on WhatsApp, stop using it and if they want to talk to you enough they'll join a better platform. Maybe just keep sending them links every day about how trash WhatsApp and Meta are until they get the point lmao

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    Already did that, and after two years I'm back on WhatsApp. Everytime you do something at least a bit social it will be a WhatsApp group, you can refuse of course, but believe me, unless it's really close friends no one is going to put the extra effort to reach you.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Telegram are you kidding me?? Telegram is a thousand times worse than WhatsApp pal

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Not even close lol. The sooner we stop using meta shit the better.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    While I agree with you that Meta must die, saying that Telegram is any way better than WhatsApp is, I'm sorry to say, either delusion or extreme ignorance.

    It's not encrypted. At all. The company has full access to everything on it.

    It's also russian and actively used to spy on users by the russian FSB (FBI equivalent, kind of).

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    To be more accurate: Telegram is totally unecrypted by default, unless one chooses to enter a "secret chat", in which case you use its proprietary encryption. As such its better suited for public group chats and not for anything that needs to critical privacy, but to say it has zero encryption options is not correct.

    As for "Russian", while its CEO was born in Russia, and made his cash to initially fund it from the Russian social media VK, he has lived outside of Russia for a decade now, and Telegram is head quartered in the United Arab Emirates, with servers installed globally.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It is, and he has, but if you're following what's going on in the RUvsUA war, you can see that the authorities are absolutely using Telegram to identify dissenters and leaks.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago*

    Hate to be supporting Telegram but I recall there also being some sort of Ukrainian Telegram bot meant to be used by Russian soldiers to safely give up and be taken to the other side, using the "share location" button. IDK how that's meant to work now that you need Tor tunnels to browse fucking Telegram in Russia, though. Phone roaming or something? Point is, both sides are trying to use it for their advantage.

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