alt Hacker News> What "proprietary blobs" does Signal have?
As they say in the Github readme, FCM and Google Maps.
FCM doesn't technically require a blob — it's just that Google wants you to think it does. I reverse engineered their library and it turned out to be a criminally over-engineered wrapper around two broadcast receivers. So, the Mastodon app is proudly the first app ever to both support FCM push notifications, and be 100% open-source.
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Oo, do you have a link for your implementation? I will soon be looking at creating a library to support FCM (android push notifications) in Android apps written in Rust. And having a simpler interface with the OS (esp. if it therefore doesn't require building a non-syste library) would be incredibly helpful.
I reverse-engineered the notification infrastructure in Android, but for me it was the desire to be able to use customer-provided Google API keys ("google-services.json").
The protocol itself was easy, but my problem was that Google Play Services have a special permission to exempt itself from power management. And more importantly, grant that permission temporarily to the individual apps when they have a notification. I don't think I ever found out how to work around this.
>As they say in the Github readme, FCM and Google Maps.
Thanks, I didn't notice that. Reading this, I'm kind of surprised that Signal doesn't offer an OpenStreetMaps build as it seems like it'd be more inline with their philosophy.