GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released (github.com)

Given the state of Fairphone hardware, software and business, it is not surprising.

  > Fairphone has said they don't plan to add a secure element. It can be seen from their current devices that they don't fully keep up with privacy/security backports and lag a year behind on shipping yearly OS releases. They skip over the monthly and quarterly releases entirely. They replaced their own non-GMS Fairphone OS with a dramatically less secure /e/OS option in partnership with Murena. They clearly demonstrate that security and even privacy are not the priorities.

Yep. Gos isn't the only mfg in town if you have or want a fairphone.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_(Gen._6)_(fairp...

It's because Fairphone doesn't fulfil GOS's hardware requirements. If Fairphone addresses that, there's no reason for GOS to not support a Fairphone device.

? Not conflating, just we want a phone with both goals ...

I think it's obvious that the target audience has a huge overlap...

Every time Fairphone release new device I check width size. Still waiting for small device.

The sensor of the Fairphone camera is good enough, the software processing is what's lacking. Imo, owner of an FP4.

Without support of alternative OS Fairphone is basically a landfill. Why would anyone buy this apart from novelty factor.

I think in many cases the authors value functionality much more then esthetics.

Which is a bummer because it is a complete different point of view from the more typical user experience

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

It's like we've had this ancient knowledge passed down for generations but people constantly just ignore it.

I think the reason is that you can get quite much of a tunnel vision while developing. Everyone involved already knows what they're building and how it looks, so it's very easy to overlook it.

Case in point, I recently wrote a CLI to show which of your AWS infra is not captured in terraform, and you can either print the result as a json to consume by a machine or generate a dashboard with some charts. It took me an embarrassing while to realise that I should have included a damned screenshot in the README, in fact I think I only realised when I wanted to show it to my brother.

Good to know! For others: You open their app store, go into messaging, hamburger menu, select release channel, and choose alpha.

The one with the terrible UI, yes.

It will get ported to kotlin, material 3, and jetpack compose, just like Messaging.

Can confirm the same works on Graphene. Also works directly from the "Recents" list.

I'm just reading from the barrier here, and not knowing what it even looks like, but reading your description I can immediately agree that it is a bad design.

There's only a handful of critical details in a call history, and absolutely no reason for any UI to implement them as secondary or tertiary details: Whether it was in- or outbound. To/from what contact. The date and time.

2 taps for some other extra info such as call length, or further contact details, would be OK I guess, but for first-level info as these, it's 100% bad design.

I mean come on, design-wise this was already a "Done" thing in the golden Nokia days! https://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/03/02/a-week-with-the-nokia-n...

[*] Ctrl+F to find the image below "miss a call".

I agree with parent. When I tap the icon/picture on the history it should pull up the contact not call. I also find the need to click into a submenu for context bad UI.

Your comment is unnecessarily inflammatory.

What's so difficult about implementing RCS from a technical perspective?

particularly if you want to support all of the message-body features, of which there are MANY. it's very business-comms oriented.

I broadly expect third-party RCS apps to drop that though, like how essentially none support all of MMS. did you know MMS supports slideshows (I built support for this once)? 3d objects (mimetype model/gltf+json)? "timed text" (mimetype text/mp4)?

I'm really hoping they're doing this to pave the way for an RCS implementation. If it can be done, GOS is in the best position to make it happen, and without RCS, chatting with normies is both extremely inconvenient (large group chats straight up do not work) and categorically insecure. If I could convince all my friends and family to use Signal I would, but they just think I'm on about some weird Edward Snowden shit, and they just write me off as crazy. "Why would I checks notes download software to solve a problem when I could use the one that came with my phone?"

also I think RCS is way to insecure for Graphene OS - they have no way of making sure the communication is actually 100% secure.

In my experience, Graphene OS doesn't make compromises.

RCS is really the only thing I truly am annoyed by with rooted devices. If GrapheneOS can build something open that works we should be able to rip it apart and get it to work without passing play integrity.

> Messaging, high impact.

Messaging can be replaced with one of the hundreds decent messaging apps.

Unlike the backup app which is utterly unusable, untrustworthy and frankly crap. And CANNOT be replaced by anything else.

As it stands it's impossible to have reliable backups in GOS.

> GrapheneOS has made a big push to hire a bunch of experienced, talented app devs

That's great. How can a FOSS project afford that? Where does GOS money come from? Did Daniel win the lottery?

> People prefer larger tap targets on touch screens.

Only in a completely stupid, nonsensically A/B tested notion of "prefer". I'll refer you to this ~~excellent piece of satirical writing~~ actual post from Google design team: https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...

My comment makes it pretty clear what the disappointment is:

> shame an obvious regression happened for one of my primary use-cases: copying one-time codes

Then the "later" is that even with frontier AI review tools, it was still missed

I am not alleging vibe coding - that's a strawman.

What do you mean "why"? For the exact reason he stated in his first paragraph - a serious regression impacting his workflow.

Alpha lowers the expected level of polish and stability - it doesn't make every regression equally acceptable. It is a reasonable criticism even when released to the alpha channel.

Further, I believe it's reasonable for users' expectations to be influenced by what the project itself communicates about the development process.

> People sometimes.

I have experienced many (relatively minor but some annoying) bugs in GrapheneOS the past few years, without complaint to the developers. And have submitted bug reports and logs. I'm "in the trenches", not just slinging mud from the outside. If I were in a better financial situation right now, I would be donating too.