I am allegedly a Librem 5 user. But how I did this the last several years has been:
- I assumed calls and text don’t work so I used a Google Fi phone plane grandfathered in from before I lived this way
- The above plan allowed me to text and call from a web portal, so I always could send and receive texts on laptops using nonfree javascript
- When app society demanded that I use the apps of the appdwang, I would dual boot to a different install of PureOS and Phosh with Waydroid on there, along with Google Play so it could fit their society
This week Google Fi shut off my access to texting via browser and deleted my texting history for the 9 or so years that I used their service. They demanded the use of an Android phone to access their web page that was previously working, and even when I got one from the faraday cages and fired up the old piece of garbage, they did not actually offer a way to put things back, to restore my access to the message history, or to restore the capability for me to text via their servers instead of their definition of a phone.
As such, maybe as a surprise to no one, yet another proprietary service turned out to be a monstrosity in my life waiting to burn its users.
Also my Waydroid updated months ago to a state where it no longer operates with good performance, seeming due to an update on the AOSP side of things not Waydroid itself.
So this very much feels like Google probably has a research team who reviewed my posts on these forums and determined what I was doing – or the trend of people benefiting from the kinds of stuff I was doing – and then took action to stop me.
But I am genuinely feeling like I don’t know how to use the Librem 5 now. I absolutely enjoyed texting via browser on WiFi. The battery drain difference with the Modem enabled is immense and I essentially played with HKS such that I would either do WiFi or Modem but typically not both, using them as equivalent ways to do data.
I know a guy who knows a guy who uses jmp.chat but it always seemed like I was able to “be a Librem 5 user” and he was not because of the pain and suffering caused by the spottier service for SMS and calling induced by a smaller vendor like that. For me the Google borg thing always operated as expected until today when it went down in a big fireball, and Gemini (which I almost never use) says that it’s part of an evil intentional strategy against people like me and I shouldn’t use Google products anymore or whatever. It recommended jmp.chat then wrote an essay on how its recommendations were part of a government plot.
So obviously I have to change phone providers, maybe AweSIM, but given the security holes in SS7 it is quite annoying for me that AweSIM is anything but a data sim and actually needs to tie the messaging to the handset at all. What is the reason that I cannot sign up for AweSIM and then text from my Librem 14 only? How are you guys defeating the appdwang Google-borg?
This is sort of urgent for me as I would like to be able to communicate with confidence knowing that all MMS, SMS and calling will work 24/7 via an SS7 backdoor server that I can remotely log into from anywhere from any device and not via a device tie-in. If Google did it for 9 years why the #$/& can’t Purism or I do it?
Edit:
Literally, like, I was traveling the Earth with a Librem 5 only and could be in a foreign country and get one of their local SIMs like from street vendors (specific to that country) then texting and calling on that SIM and it would show up as my same phone number to everyone because I only used the SIM for data to do https to a server and then the server did the SS7, SMS, MMS, whatever insecure stuff. Even if we threw https in a fire to avoid proprietary JS why is everyone not doing something akin to this? Often I used texting as “email” conceptually in the sense that I would log in and check once per day even if my devices had been all off with their batteries taken out. How do people not want that?
