7 ms·

There are many apps which are very sad when you use the F-Droid version vs the Play store version. Namely push notifications, or in some cases, mere existence.

by bisby 6y ago

There are many apps which are very sad when you use the F-Droid version vs the Play store version. Namely push notifications, or in some cases, mere existence. Element.io app for a while there (at least when it was riot.im) was using polling to check for new messages instead of push notifications. Because no google means no google cloud messaging (or firebase, or whatever it is now). Home Assistant is great and open source, but they refuse to publish to F-Droid over a name dispute from years ago (someone had an unofficial app and had refused to relinquish the name and F-Droid let the unofficial app keep it). Which means if you want the home assistant app to control your lights... Play store. However. My ubports pinephone which is running Arch is missing a few key features. Performance is one. And I can't get the replacement mainboard that has the extra RAM because it's been out of stock for the past few months. And the other is Wi-Fi calling. I live in an area with poor reception and need wifi calling.I just flashed my android phone back from LineageOS because lineage wifi calling wasnt working. I really really really want pinephones and librem 5s to work out. I acknowledge it is hard "lord's work" they are doing. but it's still not quite there yet. We're getting close enough that within a few years, I'll be using linux as my daily driver, even if I don't feel comfortable recommending it to my grandma.

zeta0134 6y ago
Could you elaborate on the Home Assistant thing? I'm running that app from the F-droid store right now, and I sorta blindly assumed it was the official one. Now I'm worried; is this some outdated clone?
- bisby 6y ago
  https://github.com/home-assistant/android/issues/42 https://github.com/home-assistant/android/issues/42 > We have no interest in maintaining a branch of the app that doesn't depend on any proprietary services. Developers explain why they wouldn't (naming issues, and "the point of the android app vs just using a browser is to have the location tracking, which requires google services") and then the thread was closed. And then I stopped following the issue and begrudgingly installed from Play store (I'm not de-googled, because like the GP mentioned, it's very hard to do even if you think you have done it, so in some cases I don't even try). There are a LOT of locked threads in their github issues on the same topic. The F-Droid version appears to be a build of the appropriate repo, and the description says "This is the minimal flavor that does not have location tracking or notifications" (so the 2 things mentioned previously, location and push notifications are hard to do without Google). https://github.com/home-assistant/android/pull/682 https://github.com/home-assistant/android/pull/682 here is the PR that adds in a "minimal" flavor without the Google features. I stand corrected. A bunch of neat things have happened since I stopped paying attention, and I'm pretty proud of the HA team for getting around to resolving this amicably, even if they were a bit rough about it in the beginning. edit: ... I just realized I installed Home Assistant from F-Droid when I just re-imaged my phone this weekend. Without even realizing it.
  - johnbrodie 6y ago
    For what it's worth, location services work fine in MicroG, at least for any app I've tried. MicroG presents the same API as the "real" Google version, and lets the user choose which backends to use for things like network-based location.
  - 0e6cbf 6y ago
    I found that the mobile interface for Home Assistant works great without needing an app. Just pinned my HA website to my home screen and there's one less piece of software on my device. There is some HA cloud paid service IIRC - I can't speak to whether an app would be needed for that. But for my purposes the mobile web is more than sufficient.
    - bisby 6y ago
      I mostly use the app for adding widgets. It works great but native smoothness of apps wins by just a little bit for me. plus the web browser version kept logging me out. Definitely a thing I could live with if web browsing was snappy enough (which for me on pinephone, it isnt). I could survive without a HA app, if it meant the rest of the device was usable... but that's not the state it's in for me, so for now, I use the app (from F-Droid)
kop316 6y ago
> And the other is Wi-Fi calling. I live in an area with poor reception and need wifi calling.I just flashed my android phone back from LineageOS because lineage wifi calling wasnt working. So you know, that is because of a proprietary library that is included in Android. It isn't included in the AOSP build, which is why it was not wokring for a while (it is wokring now). I am curious how WiFi calling works though. VoLTE is essentially VoIP (so data), I imagine that SMS on LTE is very similar, and I know MMS is over data too. My intuition would be that somehow, some sort of VPN is being established?
- bisby 6y ago
  It's definitely not working in any Lineage 17.1 or 18.1 builds I've tried. Or is it in the gapps layer? I always go with the minimal gapps, so that would make sense.
  - kop316 6y ago
    It's not in gapps. I have it working on T mobile USA in the latest grapheneOS
- wiml 6y ago
  From what I remember (and this was a while back), wifi calling establishes an IPsec tunnel to the cellular provider (using your SIM for auth) and tunnels GSM frames over it. It's intended to let you handoff between "real" towers and wifi networks the same way that you move between one tower and another, which I assume means that it has to implement some functionality that is normally hidden in the baseband processor.
  - kop316 6y ago
    Hmm..interesting. Maybe if/when I have spare time, it'd be interesting to look at.
m463 6y ago
I got to try the purism librem and it was snappy and responsive. touchscreen input was fluid. I didn't try a lot of apps. In comparison I saw some pine videos and every one seemed to be laggy and stuttery right at the main screen I'm uncertain the root cause of this. It could be hardware performance, but I would guess that's not all of it. It might be performance tuning. I think apple does really good tuning on their hardware. The reason everyone senses apple is good/solid is because they've tuned the UI to be very responsive. It doesn't mean apple stuff will execute an app faster, it means that the touchscreen input and graphical output are highly linked/tuned. I think it's designed in. I think that's probably the key to all of this. Put the touchscreen and the graphics in the same library, and dispatch to the app while preventing it from impacting the feedback loop. Then it won't matter that you have a slower phone or that your app is a script instead of compiled.
- seba_dos1 6y ago
  > It could be hardware performance, but I would guess that's not all of it. It might be performance tuning. At least when it comes to comparison between these two devices, the answer is simple: it's the hardware spec. It's not like the Librem 5 uses some specialised kind of secret software - it's all FLOSS and it's being reused by various PinePhone distros a lot.
  - m463 6y ago
    I think there are MANY things to do to tune a linux distro. Configure the kernel properly - ensure you use the correct devices. There might be a specific driver for the device you're using and an emulated or software driver that takes over if it's not loaded. It could be that opengl is accelerated on one phone, but not the other. etc...
    - seba_dos1 6y ago
      It theoretically could be, sure, but in this case it's really not. There's no software "secret sauce", this is just a difference in hardware's abilities which makes perfect sense when you look at their specs.

by bisby 6y ago

zeta0134 6y ago

Could you elaborate on the Home Assistant thing? I'm running that app from the F-droid store right now, and I sorta blindly assumed it was the official one. Now I'm worried; is this some outdated clone?

bisby 6y ago
https://github.com/home-assistant/android/issues/42 https://github.com/home-assistant/android/issues/42 > We have no interest in maintaining a branch of the app that doesn't depend on any proprietary services. Developers explain why they wouldn't (naming issues, and "the point of the android app vs just using a browser is to have the location tracking, which requires google services") and then the thread was closed. And then I stopped following the issue and begrudgingly installed from Play store (I'm not de-googled, because like the GP mentioned, it's very hard to do even if you think you have done it, so in some cases I don't even try). There are a LOT of locked threads in their github issues on the same topic. The F-Droid version appears to be a build of the appropriate repo, and the description says "This is the minimal flavor that does not have location tracking or notifications" (so the 2 things mentioned previously, location and push notifications are hard to do without Google). https://github.com/home-assistant/android/pull/682 https://github.com/home-assistant/android/pull/682 here is the PR that adds in a "minimal" flavor without the Google features. I stand corrected. A bunch of neat things have happened since I stopped paying attention, and I'm pretty proud of the HA team for getting around to resolving this amicably, even if they were a bit rough about it in the beginning. edit: ... I just realized I installed Home Assistant from F-Droid when I just re-imaged my phone this weekend. Without even realizing it.
- johnbrodie 6y ago
  For what it's worth, location services work fine in MicroG, at least for any app I've tried. MicroG presents the same API as the "real" Google version, and lets the user choose which backends to use for things like network-based location.
- 0e6cbf 6y ago
  I found that the mobile interface for Home Assistant works great without needing an app. Just pinned my HA website to my home screen and there's one less piece of software on my device. There is some HA cloud paid service IIRC - I can't speak to whether an app would be needed for that. But for my purposes the mobile web is more than sufficient.
  - bisby 6y ago
    I mostly use the app for adding widgets. It works great but native smoothness of apps wins by just a little bit for me. plus the web browser version kept logging me out. Definitely a thing I could live with if web browsing was snappy enough (which for me on pinephone, it isnt). I could survive without a HA app, if it meant the rest of the device was usable... but that's not the state it's in for me, so for now, I use the app (from F-Droid)

kop316 6y ago

> And the other is Wi-Fi calling. I live in an area with poor reception and need wifi calling.I just flashed my android phone back from LineageOS because lineage wifi calling wasnt working. So you know, that is because of a proprietary library that is included in Android. It isn't included in the AOSP build, which is why it was not wokring for a while (it is wokring now). I am curious how WiFi calling works though. VoLTE is essentially VoIP (so data), I imagine that SMS on LTE is very similar, and I know MMS is over data too. My intuition would be that somehow, some sort of VPN is being established?

bisby 6y ago
It's definitely not working in any Lineage 17.1 or 18.1 builds I've tried. Or is it in the gapps layer? I always go with the minimal gapps, so that would make sense.
- kop316 6y ago
  It's not in gapps. I have it working on T mobile USA in the latest grapheneOS
wiml 6y ago
From what I remember (and this was a while back), wifi calling establishes an IPsec tunnel to the cellular provider (using your SIM for auth) and tunnels GSM frames over it. It's intended to let you handoff between "real" towers and wifi networks the same way that you move between one tower and another, which I assume means that it has to implement some functionality that is normally hidden in the baseband processor.
- kop316 6y ago
  Hmm..interesting. Maybe if/when I have spare time, it'd be interesting to look at.

m463 6y ago

I got to try the purism librem and it was snappy and responsive. touchscreen input was fluid. I didn't try a lot of apps. In comparison I saw some pine videos and every one seemed to be laggy and stuttery right at the main screen I'm uncertain the root cause of this. It could be hardware performance, but I would guess that's not all of it. It might be performance tuning. I think apple does really good tuning on their hardware. The reason everyone senses apple is good/solid is because they've tuned the UI to be very responsive. It doesn't mean apple stuff will execute an app faster, it means that the touchscreen input and graphical output are highly linked/tuned. I think it's designed in. I think that's probably the key to all of this. Put the touchscreen and the graphics in the same library, and dispatch to the app while preventing it from impacting the feedback loop. Then it won't matter that you have a slower phone or that your app is a script instead of compiled.

seba_dos1 6y ago
> It could be hardware performance, but I would guess that's not all of it. It might be performance tuning. At least when it comes to comparison between these two devices, the answer is simple: it's the hardware spec. It's not like the Librem 5 uses some specialised kind of secret software - it's all FLOSS and it's being reused by various PinePhone distros a lot.
- m463 6y ago
  I think there are MANY things to do to tune a linux distro. Configure the kernel properly - ensure you use the correct devices. There might be a specific driver for the device you're using and an emulated or software driver that takes over if it's not loaded. It could be that opengl is accelerated on one phone, but not the other. etc...
  - seba_dos1 6y ago
    It theoretically could be, sure, but in this case it's really not. There's no software "secret sauce", this is just a difference in hardware's abilities which makes perfect sense when you look at their specs.