Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @[email protected]
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There is a setting in the app permissions that is typically enabled by default to allow the app to run in the background.
That’s not how notifications work though. Most apps on Android use Firebase Cloud Messaging for notifications. Your phone has a constant connection to a Google server, and all notifications come in via that connection. The phone receives the notification and tells the relevant app.
Some apps have their own connection (for example, email apps will often connect directly to an email server and use IMAP IDLE) but it’s not very common.
F-Droid is great. My understanding is that apps on F-Droid have to be free (as in freedom), and they build most apps from source so the builds are verifiable - they’ll exactly match the source code in the repo. It’s not just a developer uploading a random APK that might be completely different from the code in the repo.
Oh my job? I scroll TikTok all day looking for morons posting crimes they do online and tagging them to be forwarded to local police departments.
I have no doubt that some police departments actually do this. You can gather a lot of intelligence from public posts by people that aren’t very intelligent.
I’ve seen policy bodycam videos on YouTube where the police knew where to find a criminal with a warrant because they were on TikTok or a similar site, bragging about some crime they committed, and tagged the location.
For email, FastMail and MXRoute are good.
MXRoute needs you to have your own domain, but they let you create unlimited accounts at that domain. You’re just limited by total disk space. Sometimes they have good Black Friday deals.
I’d strongly suggest you use your own domain. It means you can easily change provider again in the future while still using the same email address. Get a domain for your surname and give accounts to your family :)
I live in Silicon Valley and this is a standard thing here. Companies measure your success as an employee based on “impact”. Launching a new thing that tens or hundreds of millions of people like and use is big impact. Deleting old code to reduce the overall complexity of the system is also seen as having a lot of impact - old code has potential security risks, privacy / data storage risks, may require legacy frameworks that aren’t supported any more, etc.
However, maintaining an existing system isn’t always seen as impactful, unless it’s a major system or needs some large bug fixes for issues that affect a significant number of users, or that affect paid customers.
Sometimes, apps are built by a small team (say 1-4 people) during a hackathon. Eventually, that team has to move on to other work, and nobody else wants to pick up maintenance of the system they built. This is usually the reason why smaller products die.
You also need to keep in mind that if you’re using a free service, you’re not the customer. The customer is whoever is paying for the service on your behalf - for example, advertisers, paid users, etc. Generally, time spent improving the app will be spent on improving the experience for paid users rather than free ones. New features in systems like Gmail, Google Drive, etc mostly get built because paid users ask for them. This also means that apps that don’t drive revenue (like Google Reader, etc) have very light staffing.
What are you trying to protect against? Having a separate burner phone just for Target feels like overkill to me. If you’re worried about Target spying then why not just go into the store to buy things, and pay in cash?
It’s using Firebase Cloud Messaging which is a Google service
You can revoke notification permissions for an app, but then you won’t get notifications of course.