AirMessage for Android is now available on the F-Droid store! You can now download and receive updates for an officially-maintained flavour of AirMessage, built with control and privacy in mind.
F-Droid is a separately-run app store for free and open source Android apps. Open source being the key word here: apps aren’t allowed any proprietary code or dependencies, and user tracking and ads are strongly discouraged.
The Google Play version of AirMessage will continue to use Google’s services to enhance the app. This means that features like AirMessage Cloud, location attachments, and reply suggestions aren’t available when using the F-Droid release.
However, it’s still important to recognize the importance of transparency and open source technology, and allow users to make their own choices.
Both releases will be maintained and receive the same features where applicable.
You can learn more about F-Droid here: https://f-droid.org
Grab AirMessage on F-Droid from here: https://f-droid.org/packages/me.tagavari.airmessage/
I don’t care about open source! Why is this relevant?
This release is a milestone in an effort to modularize AirMessage for Android, and adapt its code to run on a greater variety of platforms.
AirMessage won’t have access to the same Google services on Windows or Linux, so parts of the code used in this F-Droid release will be shared with desktop builds, and potentially web app releases.
