[jsn]

> In this case there's not many reasons for it to be a native app instead of a Progressive Web App. This would simplify distribution.

The opposite of this is true. Blocking a web application is very easy for Russian authorities, there are well-established legal and technical protocols for that, it's a routine, it happens every day. The opposition uses apps precisely because they are more difficult to censor.

[maccard]

So is this app using some other protocols that aren't DNS/http(s) that would make it immune to a dns level block? Because a native app that makes http calls is just as easy to block as a pwa

[patrakov]

The app uses the same technology as some trojans: it connects to different pseudorandomly-generated domain names under Cloudflare protection, changing at least several times per day.

[jsn]

Not really. You can use whatever you like, the possibilities are endless. AFAIU, the most straightforward approach would be to use Android / IOS push notifications (which can't be easily blocked) to regularly push a constantly changing (to avoid censorship) URL of your backend API servers to the mobile apps.

[leppr]

I see, that makes sense.

The advantage of a web app is that it can be distributed in any number of ways though. It's trivial to take it and re-host it on different servers, as an onion service, or go the full decentralized route with IPFS or similar.

[jsn]

Yes, you can re-host, but propagating the new URL to your users will take days, and the authorities reaction time is, for high profile cases, measured in hours. Another interesting question is how will you propagate the new URL? To do that, you need some way to reach your users when your website is down. And if you have such a way, do you really need a website?

[beebeepka]

Do you really think going through all that would be trivial to the masses?

[vbezhenar]

What about onion website? Can Russia already block Tor?

[neonbones]

I'm not sure about Tor, but I know from my friends in Russian, who have direct access to this information, that the Russian government inherits all the practices and technologies from China, with DPI and all the things. Now even VPN + shadowsocks won't be a permanent solution.

It's obvious cooperation of governments that can help each other, one with tech to control, and the other with cheap resources for manufacturing. (you can google how Russian almost sold part of territories to China, there are even cities where all the administration are Chinese).

[jsn]

Not as of yet. Actually, if you use tor (with out-of-Russia exit nodes, which I think is the default when using it from Russia?), you can already freely access all the sites blocked in Russia, non-onion ones. But, obviously, tor and VPNs are good solutions only for people willing to go an extra mile to get to the prohibited content.