Eyes Up’s purpose is to “preserve evidence until it can be used in court.” But it has been swept up in Apple’s attack on ICE-spotting apps.

  • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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    23 hours ago

    I get it. Pomme bad. But why does this even need to be an “app”? Is it just a wrapper for a website?

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Because people are stupid. We had a new client whose employees were asking for an app to access their payroll. I told the manager we didn’t have one but our website was optimized for mobile. Also told her I can show them how to put a shortcut on their home screen.

      “They’re just not going to be able to handle that. If they can’t download from the app store they’re helpless.”

      “But they’ll have an icon to click, just like an app.”

      She just shook her head. I ended up wrapping the site in an app and putting it in the Play Store.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      23 hours ago

      Here’s the app’s page on Google Play.

      Features: • Anonymous Recording – No account, no personal details required. • Secure Uploads – Encrypted transfer to privacy-focused storage. • Map-Based Sharing – Videos appear where they happened, for public awareness. • Offline Support – Record even without internet; upload when connected. • Metadata Control – Strips identifying data before publishing.

      Seems like more than just a website wrapper.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Surely all of those things can be done in a browser. You can grant location and camera permissions to a website easy enough. And encrypted transfer can be done any number of ways. Offline recording is possible with localstorage. All of this seems very achievable and effectively uncensorable by Apple.

        The only thing it can’t get is App Store search rank.

          • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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            17 hours ago

            Yeah, you get some offline capabilities (like recording video to local storage) when you have a PWA. Obviously app or not, nobody is going to be uploading video without an internet connection.

          • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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            23 hours ago

            I guarantee you that all this can be done in Mobile Safari. I have done it before.

            You have to go through the “Share > Add to Home Screen” workflow instead of having the site simply install it for you, so it’s a bit more effort (and confusion) on the user’s part.

          • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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            21 hours ago

            It does. Installing them is intentionally obtuse and is buried in the “share” menu.

        • MotoAsh@piefed.social
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          22 hours ago

          It would definitely be a bit more annoying to program, and a bit more naggy to the user for permissions during setup I’m sure, and running in the background would take some finagling and extra work and iOS could still kill it in the background on you … but otherwise it’d be the same.

          • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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            22 hours ago

            Probably doesn’t need to run in the background unless I’m missing some feature?

            • frongt@lemmy.zip
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              21 hours ago

              Video uploads. If the browser tab is closed, the upload is interrupted. An app can continue running in the background.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          22 hours ago

          Sure, it’s possible. But you’re basically turning the browser into a virtual machine and building an app on that virtual machine, jumping through a lot of weird hoops in the process. It’s unnecessary. Or should be unnecessary, anyway, with a sane operating system.

          • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            16 hours ago

            A web browser is already basically a “virtual machine”. You can even run what basically amounts to native code using WebAssembly (yeah it’s closed to JVM but you get what I’m trying to say).