access to FireChat was completely cut off without explanation.
After establishing that FireChat establishes its own, independent mesh network, I would have at least expected more details on how it was cut off? Did it simply became unavailable on the publishers distribution? The followup text seems to indicate otherwise. Did Google and Apple as app publishers actively revoke access to already installed apps? Did the Open Garden publisher have a disabling functionality in place? Did they publish an update to disable it?
Without any information, it's hard to say why FireChat disappeared. […]
FireChat is gone because FireChat was a threat to the systems it circumvented.
"Nobody knows anything, but let me claim this anyway."
Censorship-resistant peer-to-peer messaging that bypasses centralized servers. Connect via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or Tor, with privacy built-in.
I think the reason these apps don't take off is the compromises they make in order to work the way they do. When you do need them, you best hope you're able to get them and get others to use them as well.
I'm missing the point. Was it that systems like Briar can't work in iOS because they aren't mesh net? If so, why not choose one that does, like Session?
Session provides protections against these types of threats in other ways — through fully anonymous account creation, onion routing, and metadata minimisation, for example.
As I understand it, these kind of applications depend on being able to perform activities in the background, which is highly limited in iOS for battery efficiency reasons--and maybe for privacy.
Many years ago I was working on a project that shared connectivity details over wifi/bt, and iOS was troublesome also due to the application not being aware of the local bluetooth address.
Possibly similar issues impact other mesh networking applications on the platform.
We're looking into whether an iOS version is feasible.
A typical iOS messaging app would use a push notification to wake the
app when a message is received, but this exposes metadata to Apple's
push notification service and the app developer's push gateway
If we don't use push notifications then the best Apple allows us to do
is wake up every 15 minutes and check for messages. But maybe the sender
won't be online when we check (their 15 minute intervals might not be
aligned with ours - clocks aren't perfect).
I'm a bit confused by the app and Mailbox app for being able to receive messages while offline separation. The normal app only supports live communication between two online participants? /edit: Looks like that is indeed the case.
