I’ll cut straight to the chase: updating the Signal app annoys me and I’d like to know your best practices.
As far as I know, there are three ways of updating Signal:
- From the Play Store. This works quite reliably, yet comes at the cost of trusting and connecting to Google’s servers.
- Via the app’s built-in auto-updater that will, after a while, suggest an update through a notification. However, the frequency of these updates is really lackluster and thus unreliable, and there’s no way to trigger an update check manually.
- Via the APK on Signal’s website. In order for this to work, you need to have done the initial installation of the app from an APK already. Also, as far as I know, this version will not use GCM / Push notifications, but rather deliver notifications through a web socket, which is a huge drain on battery. Also, you’ll have to constantly check for updates yourself or rely on the (unreliable) self-updating mechanism (see 2).
- //Edit a fourth way might be to just update via Obtainium and pulling APKs off their Github. I’m not sure what that does to GCM/Websocket usage, see 3.
Let me know how you do it, and if there’s something I’ve overlooked.
I was hoping to keep my phone fully clear of play services but notifications through FCM are unfortunately integral to the android experience now. I set up my own Molly Socket and unified push, but I sometimes notifications were delayed, and I do really like being able to see the contents and reply to messages from the notification which I don’t think unified push does (or at least molly socket didnt). And it was also the only app I had that supported unified push. I’m really hoping it catches on future. Would love to get rid of play services entirely