Right - ran a search and got no results, so am asking directly
This thing any good? Anyone run it?
Use case: want to give my kid a SEVERELY locked down Moto E (2nd gen) as a Youtube music player device and a “message Daddy” app - strictly wifi / in house only.
The first thing is simple enough. The second thing is…interesting.
I had my local AI do some research and it spat out the above. I don’t think it’s quite right but It looks interesting. Any one use it / can comment? Failing that, can anyone recommend a simple WLAN messaging app that will run on Android 6 / lineageOS? I’m sure I can dig one up but if someone has one running, I’m all ears.
PS: I’m not looking at using a VPS for this…but the above did catch my attention as fairly normie friendly. Might be worth self hosting something like that…
It says it’s opensource. Where’s the source code?
https://github.com/circlus-org
Nothing there.
I had my local AI do some research and it spat out the above.
Ah, there’s your problem.
If all you want is “message daddy” why bother with any of this at all? Just set it up so your kid can only SMS one number.
Or use Signal.
Or maybe you don’t even want to put a SIM card into the phone?
Not sure I’d recommend that; they should be able to call 112 or whatever your country’s equivalent is.
Setup a matrix or xmpp server for the messaging.
As a self hoster and a dad, I opted to use SMS and Google chat. Google chat on a kids account will only message contacts you know
I find it rather concerning that both of circlus’s GitHub repos are empty.
SimpleX and Briar are both pretty good for messengers that are only able to talk to people you know.
Honestly, any secure messaging app would suffice! Maybe minus Signal since that needs a phone number currently.
I use an XMPP server to do messaging for my kid without a “real phone”.
Honestly, with lineage it’d be pretty locked down as they couldn’t do Google play apps for major social media, but I guess it depends on how old and knowledgeable they’d be about loading micro G for that stuff.
Also, iirc, you can use an MDM with Lineage OS bc it’s still Android at its core, which could run Android enterprise, and Manage Engine does full MDM for free under 25 licenses/devices. Might be worth a test to deploy apps that way. I’ve done that for regular Android devices when my oldest wanted more freedom without me having to utilize Google all the time.
Aw crap, I may have awakened something in me…like hosting another bloody service the kids will use once and then just quit. No amount of my over-engineering can solve user apathy…so this time I’m investing less effort :)
Interestingly…the local brain found these
https://github.com/nathanielxd/simple-lan-chat
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.usikkert.kouchat.android/
I still kinda wanna do the XMPP thing now…but I have a nagging suspicion I will be talking to myself or the clanker with it.
