One of my ideas for increasing GrapheneOS market share is to market GOS as the minimalist phone so many crave.

In recent times, I’ve stumbled across a handful of articles about how dumbphones are back, and how people crave more minimalist phones to curb smartphone addiction or otherwise.

GrapheneOS is a great minimalist phone that’s still “smart,” yet secure and private.

GOS is a way better option than dumbphones because:

1. Chances are you’ll need some sort of smartphone functionality. For example: Digital “live” tickets that you can’t screenshot and need to be opened on your phone directly (Ticketmaster, MLB, etc.)
2. Using a dumbphone reverts you to older technologies and protocols, like cell towers and SMS. These are inherently insecure and shouldn’t be used anymore. So even though you might “feel” like you’re better off, your communications (text, audio, video) take a huge leap backwards in terms of privacy and security.

Might be overkill (since it’s a Figma alternative), but try Penpot.

I’m waiting for the day someone decides to challenge the behemoth that’s Canva with an open source alternative. That’d be dope.

It’s barbones Android, without the Google. You can add the Google stuff if you want, but by default, it comes completely de-Googled.

It also comes with some extra features, like granular app-level permissions, sandboxed Google Play Services (which a lotta apps use), duress PIN, and more.

Widely regarded as the safest and most private “commercial” mobile operating system.

Disclaimer: I run SwapMyOS, a GrapheneOS/custom ROM installation service.

Added.

Might add this to the pinned posts at the top of idcaboutprivacy… Any objections?

idcaboutprivacy

Here are 28 arguments for you to use.

I’d consider Signal to be the gold standard of secure communications.

You can describe it to them like WhatsApp, except it’s private, secure, not Facebook-owned, nonprofit so it can’t be bought or sold, etc.

Here’s the blog post that I share with my friends comparing Signal to iMessage and WhatsApp when they ask me about it.

It usually answers most of their questions.

No idea. Gonna try to stick to the web app instead and hold off updating the native mobile app for as long as possible.

I’ll have to try next time and report back. Honestly don’t use ride sharing too often. I prefer public transport.

I can’t prove it, but I’m 99% sure Lyft did the same thing. Had a perfect rating (and was even a driver at one point), and they banned me without explanation right after I switched to GrapheneOS.

Emailed them a few times asking for the reason, and they refused to tell me.

_"Legally, we cannot release any additional information except that we found your account to be violating our Terms of Service.

We will be in touch if we are able to reopen your account in the future."_

There’s absolutely nothing else that they could’ve misconstrued as “violating the Terms of Service.”

If Uber’s going down the same path, no more ride-sharing for me I guess. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, it’s only an aggregator that then points you to the original content. For legal reasons, I don’t think OpenSourcely would be able to host the original content natively.

I started a website called OpenSourcely to do exactly this.

It aggregates news, projects, and announcements related to open source.

I’m always on the lookout for new RSS feeds and outlets to add to it, so if anyone has any, feel free to send them my way.

This is why enshittification might be a good thing ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Canva.

Their feature set and functionality is great, but their vendor lock-in is really off-putting. Even just within their platform, it’s really difficult to move assets around within workspaces.

Let alone edit graphics that you made on Canva and edit them elsewhere, say Penpot, for example.

Nope. I suppose in theory it could, but not necessarily—it’d be up to Apple/Google to make the color decisions regarding that.

The important thing here is that it’s not about the colors themselves, but about what the colors signify.

Apple chose blue to denote that the message you’re sending is to another Apple device. By default, this Apple-to-Apple message uses the iMessage protocol. If it uses iMessage, then that implies a certain security standard.

Apple also made the deliberate choice to denote non-iMessage texts with green. If it’s green, then it’s SMS/MMS, you lose iMessage encryption, and other features like reactions.

The colors are not gonna change by default—it’s up to them to coordinate what colors are used for what. Apple’s not gonna open up iMessage (at least not voluntarily, and we saw how far they’ll go with Beeper), so Google can’t do anything about that. Which is also why they’re pushing so hard to get Apple to adopt RCS.

If Apple does adopt RCS, maybe they’ll denote it with purple bubbles, who knows. Then you’d have iMessage as blue, RCS as purple, and SMS/MMS as green.

But again, this is all about what each color signifies in terms of privacy and security.

The thing is… The bubble colors do matter. But people aren’t caring about the colors for the right reasons.

The color matters because the color has to do with the security of that message.

Sending a message through the iMessage protocol is more secure than SMS/MMS.

People should care that their messages are secure and private (and they do care, they just don’t always realize it or know it yet). Unfortunately, the people behind the whole blue vs. green bubble culture war don’t seem to focus on this security aspect, which is actually what/why it matters.

As an Apple investor who would benefit from more iPhone sales, “Buy an iPhone” is not the right response/solution to this problem, despite what Tim Apple says.

Choose open source. Say no to walled gardens.

Use—and donate to—Signal.

Greetings from GrapheneOS, as a former iOS and stock Android user.

Any benefit over just downloading the APK directly without managing it through Obtanium? I ask cause I’m guessing that for Mull, since there are no releases on its GitLab repo, it’ll just have to be downloaded directly.

I use Obtanium too, but I can’t figure out how to install apps that are hosted on GitLab.

What do you have to change in Obtanium?

Here’s Mull, for example: https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix

I may not be fully understanding your use case, but Baserow has forms and is API-first. It sounds like it would do it, if I’m understanding correctly.

It’s open source and has both hosted and self-hosted versions.

Disclaimer: I’m part of the Baserow team.