I have problem installing the messenger “signal” on my fairphone 2 with fpOpen. When I install the apk directly form the signal webpage, the app does not succeed in get internet access. When I try to register it always says: “No connection to the service possible. Please check your network connection and try agin.”. I do have network connection of course and all other apps work perfectly. All permission are given, from xprivacy and android.
Another strange thing is that in the yalp-store it says at the app page: “Your device is not compatible with this version”. That’s why I think the problem might be connected to FPopen. The app should work on any device with android higher 4.
Does anyone have a similar problem? Is signal running properly on anyones device with FPopen? Did you have to do anything special to make it work?
My guess would be that Signal is attempting to use Google Play Services, which are not normally present on Fairphone Open. If you’ve added in any MicroG stuff / OpenGapps / FakeApps / other stuff, Signal may think that Play Services are present and functional, when they are not, or when they are actually firewalled / blocked by XPrivacy (the error suggests connection issues, not install issues). IIRC it will function without Play Services, but only gives this option when it cannot detect them. If you got a warning that Signal will run without Play Services (and use more battery), then ignore the above.
Hello Johannes,
thanks for your advice. I have fakegapps and it works with all other programms. I have taken out all restrictions from xprivacy and from Android and still does not work. This is very unusual.
Does anyone have Signal on this operating system?
I have got FPOpen with Signal, too and it is working all just fine. My suggestion for you is to try out the XPosed-Module “This App Will Run Without Google Play Services”, it does exactly as its Name suggests, it forces any app on your phone to work without using Google Play Services. I don´t use anything like opengapps or fakegapps, so I don´t know how they would work if used together with the app, I suggested, but I would call it worth a try
Hello MeRo. I do have the x-posed module “This app will run without google play services”. So this does not help me much unfortunately.
The problem is somehow, that signal does not get a proper network connection and I don’t know why.
Works for me too, on regular Fairphone Open, without XPrivacy and without Google Play Services, real or fake. I do have AFWall, so I had to tell it to allow internet access for Signal, but otherwise it works just fine. I also installed the APK from the website.
As said, it works without Google Play Services if it doesn’t detect them. If Signal thinks they are present, it will try to use them. My guess here is that FakeGapps components are detected by Signal as Google Play Services components. Possibly they don’t work for what signal wants to do - Signal will then normally complain that Google Play Services need to be updated. If ‘This App Will Run Without Google Play Services’ is enabled, this dialogue will be suppressed, leaving just a connection error.
When installing, did you also install GmsCore and activate GCM (see FakeGapps homepage) before installing signal ? Or are you trying to avoid GCM altogether? In the latter case, it may help to uninstal / disable FakeGapps, install and activate signal (which will then hopefully run in non-GCM mode), and then reactivate FakeGapps.
Hello to all,
thank you so much for the support! I appreaciate the interest a lot. @Johannes: Maybe the probelem ist with the Google play service update, because I have installed the “this app will run without google play services”-module. But usually the app complains directly with a message “an update for google play services is necessary”. I had those messages for months with a foldersync-app. this was annoying and I ignored it. From one day to another it stopped. So the message with the network connection problem is a bit strange.
Resetting all network settings would be an approach I would like to try, but I do not want to loose all my WLAN-accesses “yet” (the access to the internet is quite complicated in the network where I live (security barriers)).
Anyway before I will try your approach with disabeling fakegapps. I have microGservicesCore module installed and fakegapps. Right now, I have no time but I will report as soon as I found some play-time.
Once you succeed in installing signal would you be so kind and test if messenger calls are working with any of your counterparts or only audio messages?
For me it looks as the call function is broken since the last 4.26.2, so only the audio messages are usable beside classical texting. Many thanks in advance.
It has a self update function included and frequently checks for an update on it’s own (e.g. when you don’t have google services installed - what I assume is not uncommon when you use FPOpen)
Additionally I wrote a How-To article how to move to the non-gcm version without losing your data:
Maybe there is some helpful information in there as well. In the meanwhile Signal has it’s own working backup and recovery function included which works as well.
