Well, on the other hand, do you just understand how simple cards work? I for sure don’t and I don’t see why I would need a chip from my provider to access it’s services, if I can get a digital key instead.

My general problem with cryptocurrency is their environmental impact / resource usage compared to traditional payment systems.

I dunno, been seeing quite a few posts from https://indieweb.social/@web3isgreat that do kind of give a bad impression…

Yeah, sorry, I got confused. Beeper mini does need servers to keep the notification service alive. And thus not crazy to ask for 2$ a month. Beeper cloud could indeed do without servers I guess, but I don’t know anything about that. I was just keeping up with the development of pypush (the python poc) and reverse engineering progress.

I don’t understand your point of “you have to log in with a google account”. I understood that was a requirement to check subscription status (and as such limit fraudulent apk’s).

But that seems to be a different story than “opensourcing this would mean a competitor could do it for free”.

You can already do this for free with pypush. And if you want to use something else then python you could build something based on it with any language as pypush is completely open source.

They do have to run servers in order to keep the service alive. If you want to run this stuff yourself on your own server that’s possible using PyPush. The reason they have to run those servers for you is to keep the notification service alive.

https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY

I’d like to point you to this excellent video by Technology Connections.

Those already exist! Pretty hefty price (compared to your usual ereader) but very much useable. Onyx Boox has a few models iirc