If it was all of Europe, I’d agree. That explanation seems improbable for just two countries.

SMS works perfectly well for sending https://signal.org/install

And that is what I would recommend against, even on a server that does not ban that age. If someone’s (young) age is relevant to a discussion they wish to participate in, I would suggest a throwaway account.

How were they revealed?

Why do you care?

If it’s just about following the rules as a matter of principle, I suggest not doing that. Nobody is checking, and saying your exact age on public social media is oversharing anyway.

If it’s about content moderation being strict enough to satisfy some comfort level, I wouldn’t rely on that, but I also think 13 is old enough to start learning there are shitty people online and how to deal with them, preferably with some adult support.

Kind of weird it wasn’t included for awhile.

A long while starting with the Fenix rewrite in 2020. What’s bizarre is they took a very tightly controlled approach to rolling out extensions instead of developing in the open and giving users the option to choose for themselves whether to use less stable features or untested extensions.

It was kind of bizarre; the attitude is more what I’d expect from Apple than an open source project. There was very little communication to the public about their reasoning, and what they did offer was pretty unsatisfying.

This list seems to be based entirely on aesthetics, not necessarily recommendations for apps with good features or functionality.

Every screenshot there is eye-searing with nearly the entire screen filled with 100% white.

Google is concerned with its own interests and only behaves as if it’s concerned with anyone else’s when there’s a perceived benefit to Google.

There’s a chance the preferences of some app developers were a contributing factor for Google, but I’m convinced it was about reigning in OEMs more than anything else. Your comment cites fragmentation, and there were things like Fire Phone from Amazon that didn’t ship with Google services. Fire Phone failed because it wasn’t good, but if Amazon had iterated on it or someone else had done a better job, it might have taken a big chunk out of Google’s Android profits.

excluding legitimate users

I hate this framing.

I’m generally disappointed there wasn’t more outcry about Google creating a remote attestation scheme. Microsoft proposed one for PCs a decade earlier and the New York Times called it out as a corporate power grab. I’m not sure if there was a general shift in thinking, if people thought about phones differently from PCs, or if Google had enough of that “don’t be evil” glow people didn’t question it.

I don’t love the term “sideloading”. It sounds like something more nerdy and less normal that just installing software from a source of the user’s choice.

No, I don’t think it’s likely Google will try to prevent it. That would violate the DMA in the EU, and several other jurisdictions have moved toward forcing Apple to allow software installation outside its app store. Between that and antitrust lawsuits in the USA, I think it’s very unlikely Google wants to attract more scrutiny from regulators.

But for that you have to blame Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, a lot of banks, a lot of games for using what is basically DRM for apps.

I don’t think those entities had the leverage to force Google to add remote attestation to Android. Safetynet didn’t show up until 2014 when Android was already established enough that not being on Android wasn’t a realistic option for any of them.

Instead, I think it was mainly a move by Google to make it so any OEM shipping a fork of Android without Google’s blessing would have angry users because some of their apps wouldn’t run.

When Microsoft first proposed something like that a couple decades ago, it was widely seen as the nightmarish corporate power grab it was. Even mainstream, non-techy publications were critical.

I believe this is how the higher levels of Android’s Play Integrity system work.

It is.

How the fuck did this become acceptable?

What do you expect a low-volume phone with an alternative e-paper display to cost?

I never said anything to that effect. The ancestor comment discussed running Signal for Android inside an Android emulator for account creation, after which it could be linked to Signal desktop.

Someone could presumably fork Signal desktop to allow the scenario you’re describing, but I’m not aware of any such efforts.

I imagine search of server backups would be pretty hard to do securely. Better management of locally stored media would be nice, but you can sort by size, export, and delete media from inside the settings.

If anyone is actually going to get that right in a mainstream product, it will probably be Signal.

A phone number that can receive SMS is required, but it doesn’t have to be associated with the device that’s running Signal last I checked.

It would be nice if the backups were split into time-indexed files so I could move the old parts to cheap external hard drives and only keep recent backups on my expensive phone storage.

I never set auto expiry and often search messages. Sometimes it’s because I want to find a specific fact or datum from two years ago; other times it’s just for a reminder of a memory. On occasion, if the history wasn’t there, people might remember something important differently.

This exploit involved Meta and Yandex apps running servers on your phone which Javascript embedded in trackers would communicate with. You’d have to both allow their trackers and have their apps installed to be affected.