Voice Notify is coming back! Plus, a new Matrix/Discord community!

[pilot51]

I'm back! Sorry for the long hiatus, I lost all motivation to continue the project ever since Google removed it in January 2019 over the donation option taking payments over services that aren't Google Play, which I did (8 years earlier, I might add) because Google Play didn't allow users to specify the amount. Prior to that, I had switched to keeping my phone on silent/vibrate, thus no longer using Voice Notify myself. Thanks to this and other personal projects in the early 2010's, Android development has been my full-time job since 2012 and it's very rare that I want to do even more development after work.

I recently found that someone copied the project and published it on the Play Store with the same name and icon, only removing references to myself, contributors, and the open source project and showing at the very top of the Play Store description that it was developed by their company and three people who I assume are employees. I emailed them in November asking that they provide proper credit for original work or make their version open source with full commit history; they replied 8 minutes later that they would, but over 2 months later they've done nothing about it. I've seen reviews on their version, released in 2020, from people who clearly love the app and in one case last week they believe it's the same one that they've been using for about a decade. The only replies from the company are to take the credit by thanking people for the compliments.

While I don't think I have the legal ground with the Apache License to get it forcefully removed, this misleading theft of credit motivated me to get the real deal updated and republished. It's a work in progress and I very well could have a relapse and fade away again before it's done. That's where you, the users and contributors, come in to help me stay.

I would like to try building a community chat room where we can discuss the app and maybe some off-topic stuff. Over the past year, I've been playing with Matrix, which is a rapidly growing open source chat protocol that is decentralized and federated, allowing users to seamlessly chat between servers much like how email works. I created my own "homeserver" and in it, a Voice Notify room. While I prefer Matrix, I also created a Discord server since far more people use that than Matrix and they could be bridged together. If you want to support Voice Notify and my motivational recovery, please join and say "hi!"

Of course, I am open to questions and feedback in the discussion here as well.

Join Matrix

Join Discord