Hey folks! I know a while back there was a kerfuffle because syncthing-fork for Android went dark, and then a new person showed up and claimed everything was cool and they’d been privately given the keys or something, and people were concerned. I pinned my fdroid version to the at-that-time-current release until we got clarity.
Well, it’s been a while and I just noticed I’m still on that old release. So… how’d it turn out? Do we like the new person yet? Is there a promising fork y’all are using? Or is the project dead? I’m sure I could just go look at the repo, but I’m also sure the repo would tell me “yeah, we’re all cool” no matter what, so I’m curious what the community feelings are. Have there even been any useful new releases since then?
Thanks!
Yeah, like other people covered, it’s unfortunate but also very important. It’s easy to tie “visible wifi networks” to “surprisingly precise location on globe” in many places, so the permission is named for the worst case scenario. Yes, the app might just be looking for a wifi, but it also could use that same information to locate you, so it’s the location permission. Sensible.
If they wanted to support just this one feature without requiring a location permission, they could maybe have an API that is “are you currently connected to this opaque token” API where the app can ask “am I connected” and is just told “yes” or “no”. That’s probably safe enough. And then I could register the app with my wifi without the app even knowing what my Wifi is, it just gets a unique but random string.
The same is true of bluetooth. If I can list nearby bluetooth, I can see that speaker and this TV and guess location. But there could be an API that hides that, there just isn’t currently