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A comment on PinePhone Beta. Parent comment

Re:PinePhone Beta by Mediterraneo10 on Friday March 19, 2021 @08:33PM (#26519632)
Signal only exists officially as an Android app and, for desktop, an Electron app that is not adapted for a small mobile screen at all. The PinePhone community has no say in these two pieces of software, and Signal's devs are strongly opposed to anyone creating third-party Signal clients. So, this is out of the PinePhone community's control. There is also the option of running Signal over the Android emulator Anbox, but that is very RAM- and processor-heavy, and the PinePhone has very weak, underpowered hardware.

For a handful of unusually dedicated nerds, it does look like maybe one can set up signal-cli on the phone (which, again, is not an official Signal client and disapproved of by Signal's devs), but this is not a full-featured, polished solution.

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Re:PinePhone Beta by mpol on Saturday March 20, 2021 @04:03AM (#26521549)
"Signal's devs are strongly opposed to anyone creating third-party Signal clients."

Hmm, that might have been the case. There was that famous blog post from 2016 about no third-party clients. That has never been retracted, but they got so much flac over it that they seemingly changed their mind. What I hear from the developers of Whisperfish for Sailfish OS is that the people from Signal are quite helpfull in bringing that app towards a good functioning client.

Also, there are laws being worked on in Europe that popular platforms will have to allow third-party clients, not much different from the web and its browsers. The Digital Markets Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

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Re:PinePhone Beta by Mic92 on Saturday March 20, 2021 @01:33AM (#26521001)
I would recommend https://gitlab.com/signald/signald these days. Works quite stable. I use it with https://github.com/thefinn93/signal-weechat
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Re:PinePhone Beta by linmob on Saturday March 20, 2021 @05:44AM (#26521882)
Don't forget Axolotl[0], an unofficial client for Ubuntu Touch that has been unofficially packaged up for Debian (and that package can in turn be installed with a PKGBUILD script on Arch and Manjaro). A working official client would be a lot better though.

[0] https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl

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Re:PinePhone Beta by Mediterraneo10 on Saturday March 20, 2021 @09:28AM (#26523088)
The problem with Axolotl and signald mentioned in another comment here, is that they don't have a very strong reputation for security like the official Signal apps.
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Re:PinePhone Beta by kaba0 on Saturday March 20, 2021 @10:27AM (#26523450)
I may be wrong, but I think anbox is not an emulator per se, it is more similar to how wine works. So it should not have too extreme overhead.
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Re:PinePhone Beta by Mediterraneo10 on Saturday March 20, 2021 @10:46AM (#26523563)
In practice however Anbox is slow as hell on the PinePhone.
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Re:PinePhone Beta by kaba0 on Saturday March 20, 2021 @01:19PM (#26524525)
Unfortunately, in practice everything is quite slow on the pinephone.

(But I don’t want to sound so negative, it is a wonderful project and the advances in the last year is fantastic. Unfortunately the amount of RAM, and sort of old hardware doesn’t help)

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