Tell HN: FairEmail terminated after Google falsely flagged as spyware

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • FairEmail

    Fully featured, open source, privacy friendly email app for Android

  • I just commented on the reddit post about this but I'll bring it in here too:

    The app implementation is out of touch with modern Google Play privacy requirements and APIs.

    I read through his code, starting with the Main Activity: https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/master/app/src/main/j...

    1. He's using ancient APIs. All written in Java with Activities instead of Kotlin with a single Activity and many Fragments. There are some fragments but it's definitely an old writing style

    2. He's using Tasks for multithreading/event handling

    3. Using Handlers & runnables is a terrible idea and intrinsically fragile

    4. The way he's handling synchro (persistent foreground service) is _explicitly something Google is targeting for battery issues_

    5. This code is entirely unmaintainable. He's got a 3k line service file here: https://github.com/M66B/FairEmail/blob/maser/app/src/main/ja..., nested deeply with multiple different handlers running.

    I'm not even going to discuss the fact that he has Logging statements peppered throughout the code etc.

    This app looks like a 5+ year old code base, not something persistently maintained.

    He also does not appear to use any modern Android APIs that Google requires, despite declaring the following restricted permissions:

    1. READ_CONTACTS

  • k-9

    Discontinued K-9 Mail – Open Source Email App for Android [Moved to: https://github.com/thundernest/k-9] (by k9mail)

  • All my projects have been terminated after Google falsely flagged FairEmail as spyware without a reasonable opportunity to appeal. There will be no further development and no more support.

    GitHub has the last release as of 2022-05-18 and the repository has been archived by the owner. It is now read-only.

    FairEmail was posted on HN just over a year ago [3].

    [0] https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/655#issuecomment-1131645640

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