lenovo B , that little slow piece of shit was the last phone i could use without my fingers getting sore because it was the perfect size and weight , i read a looot of ebooks on that thing until i lost it one day
With a 2015 cutoff I think my Samsung S10+ is my favorite. Its only second to the Nexus 4 which is a few years before 2015. Probably going to upgrade in the new year but going to miss that headphone jack to whatever I replace it with.
For most user data, install rsync under termux and upload the relevant directories to a server or even to the new phone across your LAN. For apps, just reinstall the ones you actually use.
Browser bookmarks and passwords are kind of difficult unless you enroll a firefox account and I’m resisting that on principle. I don’t have a huge number of them so I’ve just kept the old phone around and have been recreating bookmarks and re-entering passwords as needed. If I really wanted to do it in bulk there are messy technical ways (basically run your own version of firefox.com on a server) that I haven’t pursued. Rooting the phone is another option.
The 2FA app on my old phone poses a more serious problem since there is no way to extract the data from it without rooting the phone (I might try that), and there aren’t TOTP apps on F-droid that I like at the moment. I think my first Android project might be adapting one of the existing f-droid ones to do the right things.
Note: Beeper Cloud’s new Oct 2023 iMessage bridge never used Mac relay servers and still does not today. It uses a similar method to Beeper Mini, but runs on a cloud server.
They do claim to use a custom-built proxy for push notifications (Apple’s push notifications obviously won’t work on Android) but that’s a helluvalot less critical than a message content proxy.
Given their previous behaviour, I’ll only believe that when an independent security researcher confirms that the app’s code actually implements the iMessage protocol with E2EE as they claim.
In terms of helluvalot less critical - is it really though? Remember that the app on your phone is also witten by them, closed source and does whatever they want with your clear-text messages. If the trustworthyness of a messaging vendor is part of the critical-ness question, e2e encryption does not add anything: Either you trust them and could also do so when they process your message on their server, or your don’t and they could indeed spy on you on the proprietary client app.
End 2 end encryption is only a real benefit when the ends actually belong to the user, i.e. theres transparency about the ends being clean, which can only be shown for open source ends. If the ends are potentially compromised, there’s so security / privacy guarantee.
I’m in the US but am not a teen, so the idea of sending videos by text messages never occurred to me. Thanks for the explanation. I have been satisfied with SMS but I guess video continues to be the fungus that eventually destroys every data transport medium, heh.
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