I tried a bunch of these note taking apps and didn’t really get on with any of them. I now use the Vscode/Vscodium extension Foam which essentially gives all the note taking features and graph view in what is already a good text editor.
So long as you are mainly writing notes and don’t need the database features that AnyType has or the DataView plug in Obsidian has (though there might be another vscode extension for this - I’ve never looked), then you’d be fine.
I guess that would explain the difficulties some apps face without push notifications and releasing APKs. These big companies want you to rely on their systems. Signal was pushing their app through play store. I don’t know if an equivalent exists, but it really needs to. We need this, combined with f-droid, so we don’t have to use spyware like the Play Store.
Signal does in fact distribute an APK that isn’t dependant on Play Services/FCM on their website. Uses a websocket, so not the most elegant way I guess, but oh well.
It’s rather hidden, which I think is disappointing. But it exists. Updates itself, too.
For android, Google uses Firebase Cloud Messaging, basically a server that pings the phone when a notification for an app is available, which wakes the app up to receive the notification. There are alternatives but they need to be adopted by app devs for them to work.
For people running a degoogled android, they’ll notice most apps won’t receive any notifications until they open the apps since most apps rely on Google Play Services to receive a ping from FCM.
I don’t have any google play services so most of my apps don’t give me push notifications but I do have WhatsApp installed and that still receives notifications, they’re sometimes delayed by a few minutes which makes me think Meta have their own implementation/alternative to FCM but I’m not sure.
For Signal, their servers tell Googles FCM servers that you have notifications waiting on Signals servers and to wake up your Signal app so it can communicate with Signals servers to receive your messages.
WhatsApp and Signal claim/have end-end encryption on their messages but that shouldn’t matter when specifically looking at Googles FCM servers so, at most it would be meta data that could be obtained from the FCM servers.
jami.net/unifiedpush/ has a pretty basic explanation of push notifications on android and also showcases an alternative to FCM unifiedpush.org which has a nice little diagram about push notifications on android. Unfortunately, Unifiedpush is not widely adopted by many applications.
So there are ways to avoid Googles FCM servers on android using Unifiedpush or always having the application on in the background but for the most part FCM is used.
I’m pretty sure Element stays active in the background, it may have asked you to turn off battery optimisation and have a silent notification always active. This decreases battery life which is why most apps don’t do this but it allows the app to constantly ping the server to check for new messages and is one way around using FCM.
Fair email uses en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE instead of FCM, I’m no expert and this is just my guess but it seems to also need the app to run in the background for this to work.
Silence is SMS and MMS only and so doesn’t use internet and so has no need for FCM or any alternative anyway
Curious about this too. From what I could find, for those it seems like the push is being used to wake up the app and tell it to connect to the server where it grabs the data and then creates the notification locally. Even if a bare minimum is used there is room for traffic analysis, and I imagine Google can easily tell the app being targeted for the push, but it shouldn’t mean the contents of the displayed notification are necessarily what was sent through the server. It’s hard to find info without digging because consumer-facing stuff just calls every notification a push notification.
The alternative is an app keeping a constant connection open to the server, which understandably mobile OSs don’t like. With push only the one service needs to keep an open connection to provide updates for all the apps.
I gave it a try, but what turns me off is the weird decentralization that’s sort of black box? Like I have a recovery phrase which I associate with blockchain stuff, and there’s a vague button that says “offload data to our backup node”. And then I seem to have an account with them? The settings mentions deleting an account which is weird, because I thought it was local/lan sync only.
Their website says “No server”, but in the settings on the app it says I’ve used xxMB out of 1GB of remote storage, where/what is that if there’s no server involved? Where is my data being uploaded to?
I can’t seem to find where it stores data in a standard format on my local filesystem, so if anytype shuts down how do I migrate? It looks like my local data is even encrypted for some reason??
Basically both on their website and in the app it feels like the concept is all over the place, it can’t decide if it’s local where you own your data, stored on a server somewhere, or some sort of weird blockchain decentralized thing where your data just might vanish one day.
For the app itself I can’t figure out how to get an editing/format tool bar like I have in onenote, to change font, size, headings, insert tables, and that sort of thing.
Navigation is also confusing, I created a new note (page?) and now I can only find it in “All Objects” which is just a giant mess of stuff, whereas I’m looking for something like a tab bar with my sections and pages organized in a tree or something like onenote does it.
Overall my impression is it’s very confusing to use and understand, with a lot going on in the UI but still missing basic editing tools and organization.
I just found this yesterday so I cannot properly give a review on it, but I found Logseq which seems to be a privacy-focused knowledge management and collaboration platform. It seems very promising and reminds me somewhat of Obsidian
I tried looking for where the company developing Logseq was located and couldn't find any information at all. The only thing I found was this in the T&C
If you have any questions or suggestions about the Terms and Conditions, do not hesitate to contact me at tiensonqin@gmail.com.
I’ve been using it for several months by now, I keep everything synced with Syncthing and it’s been working really well. Android app is still rough around the edges but it does work alright.
My understanding is it was developed as an answer to Roam Research specifically, and while its model might not work for everyone, I love it.
I am trying this program on mobile and Mac but am hesitant to try on windows as the virus total scan is coming back positive for 2 hits. Any concerns there?
The community can only read the source code, as of yet. All of the source code has been provided by a set of internal developers.
The fact that it is open source means that, if somehow two malware elements have made it into the source code, then someone will eventually report it. But this doesn’t mean that two malware elements cannot be there right now.
These two malware hits on total virus scan should be communicated to the developers.
Totally agree, FOSS doesn’t mean immune from malice. I saw some articles talking about a signing issue but that was years ago. Odd they haven’t addressed it in that amount of time.
I’m not a power user by any means but I moved over from obsidian and haven’t had any issues so far. I’m using the free cloud storage right now but will look into self hosting if I get more serious about it.
Can’t say for sure. Everything is considered an object in anytype. As I understand it every line of text, every bullet point could be its own file. Instead of one markdown file for each page like obsidian does. How this will affect the syncing I can’t say.
Right now you can’t turn off the built-in sync with their servers (except by blocking traffic with a firewall). So there isn’t really anything to gain in hosting the files yourself.
When I went to trade school in 2010 for automotive repair our instructors told us this was going to happen. At the time, I thought they were just grumpy old men who didn’t like that cars were becoming more and more electronic. How wrong I was
I’m In the need of an offline calendar and gallery now that simplemobiletools got sold off
This doesn’t sound reasonable. Why can’t you keep using existing apps? Are they underdeveloped and you’re waiting for some features? If so, it’d be helpful to see what these features are in order to suggest a suitable replacement.
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