Why is Signal so reliant on Google? It’s not even in F-Droid
There is a fork on F-Droid that isn’t reliant on Google push (it uses Unified Push) called Molly. I donate to both Molly and Signal.
Signal is using Google Push messaging, but it could be used with websocket. And officially it’s not on fdroid because they don’t want forks of their app
Yet the Molly fork supports UnifiedPush so I can reuse my connection with mf XMPP server to deliver notification from a server I control. Folks have asked for UnifiedPush or MQTT as an alternative to having multiple persistent socket connections open on your device, but Signal doesn’t seem to care.
How did you get Unified Push working? Last time I checked it required dedicated server side software
How would that prevent you from forking the app? F-droid isn’t a repository for the code of the app. I don’t think this is related at all.
I don’t actually know the reason why it’s not on F-droid but I assume it has some historical reason. It has never been on F-drroid since Text-secure. Moxy Marlinspike was strictly against it afaik. If somebody has more detail on it, feel free to share it.
It is fully open-source. The distribution of the application is completely unrelated. You can still read the code and verify the build you’re running.
