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).
Let me know how you do it, and if there’s something I’ve overlooked.
Aurora store, google play store client that let’s you download from te google repository without signing in. Its on f-droid I think. Signal still uses google services for notifications tough. I recommend Molly if you also want to skip that.
Aurora is all I use. We’re still trusting Google not to inject anything malicious into the app, which they’ll do in a heartbeat if the feds come knocking.
If you listen to Graphine aurora is also unsafe as it just pishes the APK without signature check.
Obtanium can pull APKs from a website so you could use it to install the non GitHub version of signal.