On the morning of Sunday the 30th of November, we saw media reports that the Indian government is mandating the presence of an active SIM card to use messaging apps. 

What this means is that you will not be able to log in to such apps unless your SIM card is on the same device as the one where you are running the app.

For more details, see Scroll.in’s article, “Why India’s telecom department has mandated ‘SIM binding’ for WhatsApp, some other app services”

PravConf 2025 took place on the weekend of 1st-2nd March. Besides being the first official get-together of the Prav community, it also provided the perfect opportunity to get our Cooperative Society into action!

The hurdles behind

In order to register as a multi-state cooperative society, we need to have at least 50 members each from two states. This has long been a hurdle for us. Over the past three years, we’ve received more than 175 responses from across the country, with the numbers crossing 50 in both Kerala and Maharashtra.

We’re delighted to announce the first edition of PravConf! The conference will be held on the 1st and 2nd March 2025 at Model Engineering College (MEC), Kochi. You are invited to join us. Registrations and talk submissions are open. Please check the conference webpage for the same. You can help us by becoming a sponsor.

In order to get updates, please join our announcements mailing list or follow us on Fediverse.

Today, the 26th of November, is recognised as National Milk Day, in honour of Verghese Kurien who made Amul a success. In 1946, the private dairy Polson had a monopoly on milk, and was squeezing the farmers of Kaira (now Khera) in Gujarat with its low pay.

Amul was formed in response to this situation. Led by Tribhuvandas Patel, the farmers of Kaira got together to form a cooperative society so they could sell milk on their own terms. This cooperative eventually evolved into Amul, which under the management of Verghese Kurien became a huge success and turned Amul into a model that was replicated by milk cooperatives across the country.

Until now, Prav has been operating on an informal basis. This was a good way to start, as we could get things moving without being held back by formalities and paperwork.

However, we are now reaching a point where registration is necessary. Some examples of this:

• Since we don’t have our own bank account, we are currently receiving donations via the Navodaya Networks Forum and XMPP Foundation. This creates an additional expense-tracking workload on our side as well as theirs.
• International transactions are somewhat hit-and-miss from India. Every time we want to make payments for online resources like our domain or server, we have to find a volunteer with an international card to make the payment, and then reimburse the amount to them.
• We hired Softrate to implement custom username support in Prav. As part of this process, we had to sign a contract, but since there was no authorised signatory, it was signed by a random member of the community. In future, this might not be advisable.
• For publishing on app stores like Google Play and Apple’s App store, one has to either register as an individual or provide a DUNS number. Obtaining that DUNS number is possible only if we are formally registered in some way.

Because of all these speedbumps, we have decided to start the process of formally registering Prav as a multi-state cooperative society.

One of the priority features that were voted on for Prav is custom username support. This was supposed to be implemented before our Public Beta launch, but was delayed as we did not find anyone to work on it. We are now in touch with a company, Softrate India, who has agreed to take this on, but we need your help raising funds amounting to 23,000 INR (~300 USD).

The Softrate team has already started working on this, so if we meet our goals we will hopefully see custom username support come to Prav very soon!

Anyone is now welcome to install Prav from F-Droid

We are delighted to share that Nagarathna Memorial Grant is now a sponser of Prav Project. We are very grateful to Thejesh GN for the grant.

We need your help! In our experience, onboarding iOS users to XMPP is inconvenient right now compared to Android - there is no Quicksy-like phone number/SMS OTP sign up (With Quicksy app on Android, all you need to start chatting is to enter your phone number similar to how popular apps like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal works). Developing a convenient and easy-to-onboard XMPP iOS app is one of our top priorities.

Good news! Prav is now available to download from the F-Droid app store, a repository of Free Software apps we recommend for Android users. If you do not already have F-Droid, you can get it from https://f-droid.org.

Once you install F-Droid, you can just search for “prav” and install it like many other Free Software apps already available from F-Droid. This will also notify you whenever a new version of Prav is available.

Good news: we are one step closer to the Prav public beta release!

Earlier we had to create an account manually on the server and people had to explicitly request us an account by filling a form on the website. This is not required anymore :)

Prav now supports SMS registration via OTP. Thanks to Jishnu, Siddharth, Arya, Kiran and Akshay. We were unable to send SMS via OTP earlier because the Quicksy Server only supported the older deprecated version of Twilio (PravServer is based on Quicksy Server) and we had to update Prav Server to work with the newer version of twilio API. We sat together at debconf 23 in Kochi and fixed this. Thanks to debconf 23 for this opportunity.

Prav is currently in private beta and we are planning to release a public beta soon for everyone to try out the service. We are looking for a Java developer with knowledge of Android app development. Please send us your proposals along with the amount of money required for you to work on the project.

Features to implement

We need these features to be implemented in the public beta version of the Prav app:

After having a private beta launch, we did a poll with people who showed interest in planning the project, to prioritize development of features in Prav app. The results of the poll are out. We will focus our resources on these features as priority now.

Below is the screenshot of the outcome of the poll:

Some of the features are useful for the whole xmpp protocol, while others are goals specific to Prav project.

The Prav project plans to form a Multi State Cooperative Society in India. The legal requirement to do so is to have at least 50 members each from at least two Indian states. Currently, we have crossed the 50 member mark from Kerala only and trying to meet the requirement from a second state. The state Maharashtra has 19 members as of now and other states have 6 or less. You can help by becoming a member if you are interested in the prav project or by getting your contacts to be members. The distribution of number of members from each state and districts of Kerala is on the same page.

Good news!

We have initial version of Prav ready and working. We will test the app with people who are interested in the project and looking to have a public beta release soon.

Many thanks to all who helped us reach this milestone. Please check the credits page for more details.

This article was written by Kyle Rankin, President of Purism, for the Purism website blog, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

There is a well-known Chinese proverb that says “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.” This saying applies to many areas of life, and it also applies to privacy. The last few decades have seen a dramatic increase in the depth and breadth of privacy invasions from Big Tech companies. This increase tracks with the increase in smartphone usage, because what better way to invade someone’s privacy than with an always-on, always-connected computer full of sensors that people carry with them wherever they go? Few people took active steps to protect their privacy 20 years ago, but the second best time to protect your privacy is now. If you care about your privacy, what should you do, right now? Privacy Twenty Years Ago

We at Prav welcome the draft of the Digital Markets Act by the European Commission, which attempts to dilute the gatekeeping power of big companies by forcing them to open the market to new players, but we believe there is much room for improvement. For example, Apple will be made to allow iPhone users to download apps from outside their App Store, and WhatsApp will have to let its users to communicate with others through alternative messengers.

Last updated: 28 March 2025

We are raising funds to build Prav iOS app based on Quicksy. This can can take a while to complete, so in this post, we list XMPP apps currently available on iOS according to their features.

These are the features we consider essential:

• End-to-end encryption using OMEMO by default.
• Support background notifications.
• Ability for audio/video calls.
• Users can sign up within the app.
• Blocking accounts you don’t want to chat with.
• Admins should have ability to delete messages in groups.

Quicksy (Recommended)

Quicksy is our top choice for iOS due to its easy onboarding process and presence of all the essential features mentioned above.