Georg Koppen gk@torproject.org writes:
- It should not be a desktop-only application.
(I hope to not further derail this thread, but ...) Yes, I agree at least thinking / planning for mobile users at the start is a good idea.
"In general", how likely do you think a "remote control"-style mobile application would work for mobile users? What I mean by this is: the "real" application runs somewhere (e.g. at home, or on a trusted friend's machine) and presents some kind of RPC-style API/interface over an Onion service -- the mobile application is then "just" a remote-control GUI for this. Conceptually, this seems very similar to how a lot of SaaS-type mobile applications already work (except you're running the server-side software yourself on a trusted machine, only available via Onion service).
Personally, I've been thinking of this more in the context of programs like a BitCoin or Ethereum wallet/node, or a Tahoe-LAFS client -- where they kind of really do need to be online 100% (approximately) of the time to be most useful and often use a lot of data (or CPU). As in, you're not going to keep ~150GB of bitcoin transactions on your phone.
For chat, this would have the advantage of being "always"-online (for e.g. IRC this is important). This *might* have privacy advantages, too (e.g. keeping metadata emanating from your home-machine slightly more consistent, keeping a consistent traffic pattern to any chat-servers like IRC or XMPP you're conncting to, etc).
Another advantage: the "remote control phone" piece would presumably authenticate to your home machine via some keypair -- which can be revoked easily (e.g. if the phone is lost or stolen). Ideally such an application would keep *zero* data on the phone, and re-sync any relevant state the next time it connects via the Onion service.
BUT I don't know if this would actually be a "thing that might work" for mobile users. Obviously, it's not-great for mobile users who don't have any other computing devices. Are there statistics on this sort of thing? (e.g. what % of mobile-users have a computing device somewhere else on the network?)
Cheers,