The next, next big thing would be the Chatmail relays[1] supporting JMAP based servers (right now it's Dovecot) and this new targeted push extension for faster notifications without battery drain on mobile. I can see how the Fastmail mobile client will benefit from this RFC as well (it's already incredibly battery efficient, thanks to the team).
This is a security patch which is different from the QPR1 release. _Supposedly_ once they partner with an OEM they will get more reliable access which would be nice, but I'm hesitant. I switched my Pixel 8 Pro to Graphene a few months ago and really like it.
> Spreadsheets are a fundamentally important tool—the original "killer app" for personal computers such as cellphones
I do not agree with your supposition. Like the parent using the G1 as I did (and still have it), never used a spreadsheet app on any of my many, many phones both personal and work. I am/was a systems engineer by trade.
> Last I checked, there was no spreadsheet in F-Droid
The most popular viewer is the LibreOffice one[1], which can handle ODS and XLS (amongst many others) formats. You may have meant editing/creating which I agree they're not around. See item (1) above though.
> largely because it's a relatively small ecosystem, and most Android users still aren't using F-Droid
Or possibly, a large number of users simply do not need or use generic spreadsheet apps on their mobile devices, which is why I disagree with your opening statement as I am a direct counterexample.
I think they just got carried away with the term "personal computers such as cellphones". I believe they were referencing the common recognition of VisiCalc as one of the first "killer apps" for personal computers.
I'm sorry my comment was so unclear. I'll try to explain in more detail.
1. Cellphones are a kind of personal computer.
2. Numerical computation is something that computers, personal or otherwise, are very good at. Conservatively, your cellphone is ten orders of magnitude faster (ten billion times faster) than you are at tasks like averaging a set of numbers.
3. The spreadsheet user interface is expressive enough for many numerical computations† that are impractical to carry out with more limited user interfaces such as pocket calculators, but it is simple enough to understand that large masses of people can take advantage of that expressivity. (The popularity of VisiCalc on early personal computers such as the Apple ][ is one piece of evidence for this.) It is the "low-code development platform" that inspired all the current no-code and low-code platforms.
4. Such numerical computations are so commonplace in many people's lives that they do them on their cellphones, despite the small display and lack of a keyboard; one reason is that many people have cellphones as their only programmable computers. When they do such complex numerical calculations on their cellphones, they often use spreadsheets to do them.
5. Therefore, we should regard the availability of spreadsheets as a central indicator for the viability of a computer software ecosystem, even on cellphones.
I think all of these claims are obviously correct, stipulating the ones before them, except for #4. As evidence for #4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCpJ441g-Y4 shows that the Google Sheets app for Android was at the time #7 in their "productivity" category with 793000 ratings and 4.8 stars. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... says that it has been downloaded more than a billion times and has 1.27 million ratings. The fact that people exist who do not use their cellphones for spreadsheets does not constitute evidence against this claim.
What I believe is happening, to elaborate a bit more, is that F-Droid users who need numerical computation that goes beyond what calculator apps can do are mostly just using the Google Sheets app. The radical fringe of F-Droid users like me who do not have Google accounts often make do with Termux programs such as Python, LuaJIT, PARI/GP, bc, Racket, or the C compiler, even though for many purposes a spreadsheet would be much more convenient.
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† Spreadsheets are also used as simple databases, in fact more frequently than they are used for numerical calculations, but numerical calculations alone are a strong enough argument for my purposes here, and F-Droid does have a number of adequate simple database apps.
I think this just fundamentally does not track, because the vast, vast majority of phone users are not regularly using a spreadsheet app.
When we imagine phone applications, we think messaging, social media, web browsing, and email. That's 99% of stuff people do on their phone.
The statistic of "how many people have this app installed" is fundamentally flawed. Why? Most apps are worthless. Throwaways, single purpose.
Its entirely possible, and dare I say extremely likely, that people install (or it came installed!) Google sheets for one document that was shared one time, then forgot about it.
It seems improbable to me that photography, video recording, video games, phone calls, digital payments, video calls, tethering, and charging the battery would all be outside of that 99%. Possibly you don't know very much about how the vast, vast majority of phone users use their phones, for example because your friends and family aren't typical of Indonesians, Nigerians, Indians, and Chinese people.
Or because you aren't especially interested in whether what you're saying is true or false, since it is—to me at least—obviously wrong. And you're surely somewhat aware of how atypical your circle of friends is among, for example, either Malaysians or Texans, and probably both.
None of those are spreadsheets... And a lot of those are built into the phone. Like phone calls, digital payments, video, photography.
I just think using spreadsheets as a measure of an application repository for phones is obviously stupid.
Please bear in mind that things like the playstore aren't android phone stores. They're Android stores. Meaning, they also target tablets and chromebooks.
Now, I'm sure Google sheets on an android tablet is perfectly mediocre. But I can assure you, on a phone, it is downright painful.
Sharing undocumented gotcha: nginx default config (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf) now has `server_tokens off` set with a comment that it's "common practice" (agreed). This is not in upstream's git version of the file[1], I therefore presume it's a Debian maintainer change.
The operational upgrade failure is if you have any existing drop-in config that sets `server_tokens off` already a hard fail Nginx error about duplicated keywords will occur, causing the apt process to exit with failure code(s) during the standard upgrade process.
As an actual answer, it's not too bad on Debian; we only really use/need: systemd (system and user), -logind, -journald, -udevd. All in all, not too many tentacles but there are a few...
> I just ran a backup, and it was 850MB. So having my phone upload something of that size every day would be a bit annoying
It may be inconvenient but this can be solved by using the features in the app to review your storage and save those thousands of images/audio/file sequestered inside the app out to the filesystem, then delete them from the app. You're not backing up "chats" you're backing up your image library being stored inside a chat app.
(yes I get the argument that you need to store them "in context" so save those and do the rest. there's no way 100% of that 850MB is "must have saved inside the app in chats" data, I'll bet $10 USD on it)
We're partially there, under Storage is an option allowing you to set how long to keep messages and I've set mine to one year. Possible: forever (default), 1y, 6mo, 30d - and it works, my old chat messages (not the whole chat, just individuals) are properly culled over time.
Edit: in context, Google Messages has none of these features and I have friends still married to Google Voice who send me tons of pics. Culling SMS requires using a third party tool to export and re-import etc. leagues behind Signal. None of it's backed up without the same third party tools as well and no built in image management.
Been running Linux on laptops since around 97 (Dell Inspiron 4000 clone, PII-400 I couldn't afford the PIII-450, Red Hat 5.x); over many years and laptops it comes down to: use a Thinkpad T-series or a Dell Latitude/Precision (modern times, not the XPS or Inspiron) and your Linux experience will be quite smooth. (sometimes card reader hardware doesn't work if they used some weird chip, which Dell seems to like to do with those devices)
I would recommend Aegis Authenticator [1] - available in the Play store or F-Droid. It's been featured on HN now and again. One thing it can do is import the data of all the other OTP apps, and create backup files (the seeds) which you can do whatever you want with.
I use this, but recently ran into an issue: I only have one Android device. It's great to be able to back up my secrets, but frustrating to need to spin up an emulator on my computer to run an Android app just to use the backups, if my primary device is offline for whatever reason. Is there a way to use the vault directly?
Very interesting question, I have no experience here. What I do instead is scan my QR codes into two apps on different devices when I make them (I do not make them very frequently so it's not a chore). Because I'm sort of pessimistic after a lifetime working in tech - everything that uses electricity breaks and fails. I build redundancy into all my (things) and just expect one of them to fail. Goes for email providers, hard drives and OTP codes - if I could have a backup washing machine, I would. :)
I just copy the OTP-URL from Aegis and place it into pass (passwordstore.org, with the pass-otp extension) on my desktop computer. That pass instance is backed up along with everything else which matters.
If you move the secret tokens onto the same device (like in that emulator that presumably runs where your password manager also runs), we're again back to the oathtool solution that is described in the OP, that doesn't have the same security benefits as the original intent of supplying you with a 2FA token. Not saying you shouldn't do this, just something to be aware of when you use the export mechanism in this way
1. Aegis has a setting for creating secure backup on every change.
2. Autosync that backup directory via syncthing to your PC.
3. Run a compatible desktop software (e.g. linux has authenticator) to import aegis backup files manually.
Since totp addition is not a frequent activity, the last manual import step was not a hassle to do whenever needed.
Keepass now supports 2fa tokens, just use that. Plenty of open source clients on different platforms and you can sync the encrypted database file using whatever mechanism you like, drop box, one drive, etc.
KeepassXC (Linux) can import Bitwarden files directly as well, as both programs support H/TOTP there's a solution here. Not what I do, but I can see the use case aligning to the GP's comment - using Bitwarden (e.g.) as the TOTP app could allow importing it's backups to KeepassXC if your main/only mobile device fails and you only have a laptop etc.
The next, next big thing would be the Chatmail relays[1] supporting JMAP based servers (right now it's Dovecot) and this new targeted push extension for faster notifications without battery drain on mobile. I can see how the Fastmail mobile client will benefit from this RFC as well (it's already incredibly battery efficient, thanks to the team).
[1] https://github.com/chatmail/relay
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