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.
I’ll reply to you since you first brought it up, but it’s a question to anyone here recommending Molly: what makes you cofident that Molly is secure (i.e. they’re not fucking up Signal’s cryptography by accident) and maintained by trustworthy people. Signal does get audits from time to time, Molly doesn’t.
Mind you, I’m not trying to shit all over Molly; Unified Push looks great. I’m trying to approach this with due caution though.
What makes you confident Signal is secure? It’s a centralised service, so there’s a single point of failure 🤷