Is there any proprietary Android app for which you wish there would be an open-source alternative?
Basically, what the title says. Do you use any app, that is proprietary, but either has no OSS alternatives or they're all not good enough? If there is an alternative, what keeps you from switching?
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Whatsapp. I know signal, simplex, matrix, (a billion other things), etc exist that are much better, but where I live, no one uses them, for context, basically everyone, like if you have a phone, you use whatsapp, some government things even happen through whatsapp bots, when people say the word message here, they mean whatsapp. There are about 20-30% (among younger folks) who use telegram, but that is mostly for easier piracy, and larger file sharing (before whatsapp allowed 2 GiB, now they do it habitually). My mom has about a 1000 contacts, and less than 10 of them actually use signal (there are many more who signed up(there was another thing, basically when elon said "just use signal"))
At this point it is not worth getting everyone to switch, the best i have done, is just reducing the number people i communicate with (on whatsapp), and try to just meet in person
I use Matrix with a WhatsApp bridge. Best of both worlds.
Which bridge do you use? do you self-host it?
mautrix-whatsapp and, yes, self-hosted.
Is there any way i can host the whatsapp bridge but not the matrix instance itself, or something simpler. Even then, it does not really make my situation better. It would be adding one more layer between me and whatsapp, but not much more. As I understand, bridges help when you have multiple platforms, and you want to have one way to access them all, for me, only benefit would be the client would be free
I'm currently on holiday in Croatia and my car rental company, one apartment as well as one tour guide have communicated/provided info through WhatsApp.
signal has proprietary blobs, you want Molly-FOSS
I personally do not use them anything else now, i do have element installed, but when you have no one to talk to, you might as well write messages in a notepad