Comment by LWIRVoltage
4 months ago
I recently took a flight with family- on a budget airline that did not have Wifi, so we could not hop on WiFi and message each other using Signal. I wondered what other options there would be in the air- and remembered Bluetooth Communication apps- and had everyone install Briar- it came in haandy!
I like the built in Bridge option as well, (when the app communicates over the internet) to help avoid revealing the traffic is Tor traffic.
I have been impressed by the range of Briar- with a clear line of site, easily hundreds and hundreds of feet- i tested it to well over 500 outside- and on the plane , my family was scattered, but that was no issue at all. (More recently though i've detected my own Bluetooth MotoTag trackers from my luggage in Cargo holds while on planes, so Bluetooth indeed works well on planes.)
-I have heard of but have never used BridgeFy, which I know was a well known famous Bluetooth app that competed with Briar in the past. To my understanding it isn't quite as secure or open source.
There is a informative post here https://old.reddit.com/r/Briar/comments/gxiffy/what_exactly_... where a developer noted Briar's capabilities at that time- it seems due to some changes on the OS/phone Hardware end, and whatnot- and due to the phones only passing messages to contact nearby - Briar is not a true mesh networking app. It is a shame- i feel a true Bluetooth mesh networking app would be unstoppable in availability -though it might be a bit of a battery drain.
It is a shame Briar isn't on iOS also -
I also wish Signal would eventually consider communicating over any medium accessible- they would probably run into similar issue Briar has.
What will it take to get a Peer-to-Peer capable Bluetooth/Wifi/Celluar network using/(more possibly in the future)- proper optional mesh networking, Tor capable, VPN friendly, wholly end to end encrypted ,perfect forward secrecy including, fully open source App providing messaging (with the 'accounts' that Briar uses?), for Android and ios?(And Let's throw in PC Mac and Linux, so laptops could have a extremely user friendly user accessible way of doing this as well.)
Better yet, add Calling capability- i don't know how rough doing video calls would be over some methods like modern day Bluetooth- but even a rough capability would be used a little and be worth adding to the collection of things one could do(Briar is only Messaging at the time of this post- which is something notable for sure,as very few apps let you transmit solely thru Bluetooth<I have not heavily looked into the shared Wifi communication abilities of Briar at this point in time> - but more could be added in some form...I observe apps do exist that allow for Bluetooth calling or act like "Bluetooth" Walkie Talkies)
Unfortunately, iOS simply does not allow apps like Briar to run reliably in the background[1]. Unless Apple changes its thinking about iOS, Briar or other similar apps would never work reliably.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/685525
People have the power to not use iPhones, and should exercise it.
Switching ecosystems is a huge pain, I started with iPhone and eventually moved to Android and back again to iPhone. When you use a lot of the Apple/Google Services, it's not really easy to just switch over
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Honestly with Apple not producing folding phones I think in a few generations everybody will have naturally moved to Android
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I don’t trust Android.
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Okay, buy me an Android then.
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I actually have an app in iOS store that completely executes in the background: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id6737482921?mt=8
Never had it stopped by iOS. So not only there's no fundamental restriction, the App Store itself allows some apps to do that.
What API are you using to keep running in the background? Most likely you are misusing it on some manner and have yet to get caught by App Review.
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Not sure what you mean with fundamental. As mentioned in the thread parent comment links to, the issue lies in enforced limits and lack* of general mechanism available to developers to allow background execution for any kind of app or/and purpose. No one said iOS itself lacks the functionality for background execution.
*In the same thread, it is noted that this lack is by choice and special-purpose mechanisms are preferred instead to prevent abuse.
There's AltStore sideloading, would that enable it?
It's not an issue of sideloading or censorship in iOS. It's a product decision related to background apps (they kill the running process with no recourse to bring it up again on its own).
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I have a feature request for this actually. I think if it got a harder push they would consider it. It's not full decentralization but does still prevent the concerns that Moxie and Meredith have stated.
It is like you say: I too wish Signal would allow for communication over any available medium.
https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-airdrop/37402
Have you seen Meshtastic (https://meshtastic.org/)? It seems like a similar concept but using dedicated devices and unlicensed ISM frequencies, and it's a proper mesh network (so you can even setup repeaters to provide better coverage for an area). I guess they wouldn't work too well if you're travelling to another country since you'd have to get the right radios for the country but it's a neat idea.
Furthermore, the latest build of Meshtastic mentioned some LAN networking, so nodes that don't have radios can still exchange messages if they're connected by some other means.
That seems just a hop skip and a jump from having a Bluetooth WPAN/WLAN that lets many phones share one or zero Meshtastic radios but still be able to talk to each other...
I've been checking out https://reticulum.network/ which does the same thing as meshtastic, but encrypted. Looks like it's in the early stages though.
How was your actual UX with Briar? I tried to get family to use Briar during a flight and it was pretty poor. Messages wouldn't show up and we were worried about disconnecting from personal Bluetooth headphones while keeping using Briar. It worked okay and at one point my partner and I chatted about landing plans when the person next to us was asleep. But we found that just passing the phone around with typing worked just as well. It worked okay for the other family but again, was a pain.
It worked well! Most messages did go through! The caveat- I don't think anyone was also using Bluetooth headphones
500 feet outside was the test i did with a clear sightline- the inside of the plane was not quite as far, but the messages did go through - and we couldn't have passed the phone around when one family member was 5 seats behind me, the next was about 20 rows in front of me