• anomnom@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    89
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 day ago

    Anyone have a link to the app/website? I’d like to follow some among honing my horn and warning folks.

        • SMillerNL@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          55
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          15 hours ago

          This is IOS only owing to Android play store collecting a device identifier; the creator wanted complete anonymity

          Quote from some other place people were discussing it. Unfortunately no source on it.

          EDIT: https://www.iceblock.app/android

          • vala@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            16 hours ago

            It’s 1000% possible to use android apps without involving Google in any way.

            • SirQuack@feddit.nl
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              28
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              1 day ago

              It’s not about the store, it’s about the notification.

              As mentioned in the Time article:

              the app is not available on Android because it “requires a device ID in order to send push notifications, which requires a user account and a password.”

              • TFO Winder@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                11
                ·
                1 day ago

                Its totally possible to send notification without having user account, see firebase.

              • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                20
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                1 day ago

                You don’t need a user account or password to receive a push notification.

                You just need to have the app installed. The app can be configured by the developer to receive push notifications.

                  • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    15 hours ago

                    How do you suppose APNS knows which device to deliver the notification to?

                    Something that… links it to the device? Like, a unique ID that Apple can identify?

                    It sounds like he thinks HE has to store this information, which is simply incorrect. It will obviously be stored by Google in Firebase, and by Apple wherever that gets stored, but HE does not have to store it.

                    I write apps for a living. I have users subscribe and unsubscribe to channels, and at no point is there a user account with password involved in either iOS or Android. If you want the memory of which channels they have subscribed to to persist across uninstall/reinstalls or different devices, then yes, but for an app like this you don’t need to persist those settings.

                    At any point the government could subpoena who’s received pushes (or at least, who’s registered to) from both Google and Apple.

            • SMillerNL@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              17
              arrow-down
              6
              ·
              1 day ago

              Thanks, but I’m not the developer of the app so that’s not really relevant for me.

              • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.net
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                12
                ·
                1 day ago

                i don’t think this other commenter was calling you out. i think they were just bringing up a point of discussion that’s relevant to the point you brought up

                • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  3
                  ·
                  1 day ago

                  It has to do with receiving notifications from the app in a privacy-preserving way. Unless the app is running with a server connection 24/7 (RIP battery life) you need to rely on the OS to deliver notifications.

                  • Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                    link
                    fedilink
                    English
                    arrow-up
                    5
                    ·
                    1 day ago

                    You don’t, there’s privacy respecting ways of delivering notifications in android.

                    Also, a 24/7 connection to a server isn’t nearly as bad as you might think.

                    The connection isn’t active the whole time, it only uses any significant amount of battery if there’s actually data being sent or received. You likely already have quite a few of them anyway, how do you think systems normally listen for push notifications?

                    Besides all that, I read in other comments that the privacy issue was the device id firebase needs. Obviously apple also needs some kind of device id, otherwise how do they know where the notifications are going?

                    Did some searching, yup apple also needs a unique identifier:

                    When it’s time to send a notification, you generate a request that contains the notification data and a unique identifier for the user’s device.

                    From https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/setting-up-a-remote-notification-server