I’m aware they lag behind in updates, only reason I chose to use Molly was because if I recall correctly they use Google Firebase for notifications, and I use grapheneOS and don’t have Google play service installed. So not sure if I would get notifications in my setup if I used signal witn no play services.

Correct me if I’m wrong though

Those are also my two biggest gripes about Signal as well. At least the Molly fork solves both of those issues, that’s what I use.

Agreed. They should not have tied it into a Google account, literally ruins the whole point of being anonymous on there. I get they needed to implement some sort of easy payment method, but this isn’t it.

Only thing I could think to do is create a burner Google account, buy a Google play card in cash, and add those funds to your burner account to pay the 3 dollars.

No duh bro. More than one person can live at a house though. So USPS knows who owns the house like you said, but not anyone extra unless that data is given to them, like for example when you create an account and include that you ALSO live at an address as the owner.

Moreover, if you read USPS privacy policy, they use Google Analytics, so guess what? Anything you do on USPS also goes to Google. They also allow tracking pixels from meta, LinkedIn, and several other companies.

So no, it’s not just “the fucking USPS already has your address dude”, it’s that several other companies also are getting that data when they dont need to be. That’s literally the whole point of this forum and the data I provided above is relevant. All I’m saying is if someone wants a PO box, it’s not as private as one may assume. The seller you’re buying from won’t know your address, but tons of tech companies will.

I honestly hate people like you. Learn to be more curious and ask questions instead of trying to be a smart ass. You could have asked “But why worry that USPS already has your address, aren’t they literally a delivery company?” That’s a completely valid question, yet you chose to be a dick. Go fuck yourself.

Correct, the seller wouldn’t know, I’m just saying that that data now goes to UPS or whoever your PO box provider is instead of the website you’re purchasing from

In my experience, when I went online to rent a PO box, they force you to create an account and asks for a bunch of invasive information anyways including my address, so I gave up on that idea for now.

Maybe it’s dependent on the post office. Maybe I just need to go in-person and maybe they’ll ask less info of me?

Is this the update that includes RCS compatibility?

No not exactly, it’s just that like I said in my post, I downloaded every single available map, so I do tap “update all” instead of tapping on every country in the list.

In reality, I should just be updating my home country and that’s it and that’s my solution. I just have more than enough storage capacity on my phone to download all countries on earth.

And I know it’s silly. It’s just something for me. Like, I enjoy thinking about how I could be anywhere at all in the world, and as long as I have my phone, I can navigate anywhere I need with no internet needed.

Our phones should be thought of more as tools, and downloading all these maps helps me feel that sentiment more

My bad, I misinterpreted. I thought you were just asking about Android music players that just play music locally. Then I saw we were in the Jellyfin sub hah. Hopefully you find a solution to your problem

Try out Poweramp, I would disable network access but otherwise this is gonna be hands down the best in my opinion. It’s a premium option though, you’ll have to pay to use it eventually but let’s you use it for like a month or two for free. Can buy it on their website and then they’ll give you an apk to download so no google services needed

Otherwise, on F droid I really like Lotus music player, looks super nice and works well. Def suggest this one as well and of course its free, so even better

I run three profiles: main profile is where all my FOSS stuff is, every day things, no tracking stuff allowed. And of it does, I just revoke network permissions. No Google play services or play store installed on this profile at all

Secondary profile has banking apps, basically anything at all to do with money or requires Google play services to work. I even disable network access for most of the apps on my secondary profile until I need to use them. Google play services and play store are installed on this profile.

Third profile is dedicated navigation user that just has Google maps and other amenities like music for listening while driving. I have this one separated because I allow my secondary profile to run in the background and I don’t want Google maps running in the background so I created a third user. The third profile doesn’t run in the background. It’s pretty easy, I just switch to it when I need solid navigation. This of course also has play services installed. I know this is overkill. It’s just for myself because location tracking is a particular peeve of mine

All my profiles have Molly installed and connected up so I never miss a text or call between profiles

What a great display of free speech!

Use Faraday pouches or leave your phone at home this Halloween. Flock cams gather Bluetooth, cellular, and WiFi data as you pass by them

Oh sick! Glad to hear that

Well that’s cool that local backups worked. I also bsck up to a USB flash drive so good to know. So you still haven’t been able to link your profiles? That’s so weird

I currently have Signal set up in all my user profiles on GrapheneOS. I use Molly though so slightly different, but I think its needed for this to work. here’s what i did:

Molly is set up in my owner profile. open the app, go to settings, link a device, select the camera option so you can scan a QR code. This just speeds up the process of linking, you’ll see later. Exit the app and switch profiles. Download Molly onto desired secondary profile, if its already installed just proceed reading. Make sure “allow running in background” is allowed for that user profile and that Molly has unrestricted battery access on both profiles before you try to link accounts. On secondary profile, open Molly and tell it to link a device. Tell it to use QR code to link accounts. You should still be on secondary profile at this point.

With another device, take a photo of the QR code that was generated from your secondary profile. Right after that, as quickly as you can, switch to your owner profile and scan the photo of the QR code that you took a photo of. The QR code expires after a certain time after its generated, so the faster you can scan, the better. Since we opened the camera for QR scanning before switching profiles, as soon as you open Molly on your owner profile, the app will open straight into the camera. It might fail to scan the first time. I scanned the QR code repeatedly until it asked me to confirm linking the account, to which you can say yes. It can only port over the last 45 days worth of messages so don’t expect to have it be a mirror copy of your owner profile. But any messages from then on out will save and will be so much more convenient instead of switching user profiles to respond to a text.

As others have mentioned, local backups wont work across profiles, so be weary of that. I think backups will only work on your owner profile. I would just re-link my profiles again and accept that Im going to lose old messages on my secondary profiles if I needed to use one of my local signal backups. Like I said this is just a more convenient method of being able to use signal across profiles. Like for me, I have a completely isolated user profile that has google maps and android auto installed, and before i figured this out, i couldnt respond to signal messages or calls while on a long road trip for example, which was inconvenient beyond belief especially when trying to plan things with my group while navigating. Yes I would get cross-profile notifs so I knew when I was being reached, but I dont have to switch profiles and interrupt my map directions anymore when I respond.

Also, enable “exploit protection compatibility mode” on all instances of Molly to save on battery. Before I enabled this, Molly was using so much battery that I could have a screen time of less than an hour all day, and still hit a low battery notification every day. I’m talking, when I look at my battery stats by the hour, Molly will have consumed 39 percent of my battery for that hour, and after enabling the compatibility mode, its down between 1 and 5 percent and my phone actually lasts all day again. I wanted to bring this up because especially if you’re running Molly on multiple profiles, if you let those user profiles run in background, your battery life will suffer majorly unless you have exploit protections on.

Hope this helps. If anyone has critiques for my setup let me know. Besides the obvious that I probably have slightly less security or whatever

Edit: added extra detail

What is the name of this app you’re using to get these stats?

It’s awfully ambiguous with the data it provides. I feel like if you were given more info it wouldn’t have been so scary, but instead it’s just labeled “14 companies” with no extra information.

Are you able to tap on it to get more data?

This is interesting. Maybe there’s an explanation for it. Leaving this comment to track this

Let’s normalize categorizing this sort of behavior as non-dickish. Now, more than ever, and especially on the internet, we should be questioning everything we see. We must stop passively ingesting everything we see on the internet as fact. So good on you for questioning.

edit: grammar

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I just looked it up and he’s just an investor, not the owner.

He’s still involved with the company though but I wanted to clear that up so we aren’t accidentally spreading misinformation 👍