Submission + - Free AGPL Consent App Ships With No INTERNET Permission At All, Uses Bluetooth O (techtalkhawke.com)
kmleon writes: Recreational therapist and therapeutic-gaming researcher W.A. Hawkes-Robinson
has released the first beta of Game
Consent, a free AGPL-3.0 app giving participants at a game table,
classroom, or therapy group a private green/yellow/red "traffic light" for
signaling comfort to whoever is facilitating — in real time, anonymously. The
facilitator sees only an aggregate, worst-rating-wins, and never which
participant sent which rating; per the developer, that attribution "is never
transmitted in a form the facilitator's device is able to resolve."
The design decision of interest to this crowd: the free Basic Edition is deliberately serverless, and the shipped Android manifest omits the INTERNET permission entirely, so the OS itself will attest the app cannot reach the network. Everything runs over direct Bluetooth Low Energy between devices in the room. No account, no telemetry, no ads, no PII. The stated reasoning: anonymity is easier to guarantee when there is nothing to leak, and the Bluetooth-only transport also works in the rural, correctional, and hospital settings the developer's programs actually run in, where wifi is unavailable or prohibited. The developer notes he has spent years arguing that screens at the tabletop damage the social dynamics of play, considers the app an unresolved tension with his own research, and is adding audio alerts in beta 2 so a facilitator can run a single earbud instead of watching a screen.
The first working version of this was not software at all: green/amber/red LEDs and toggle switches hardwired into custom-built gaming tables, wired to a panel on the GM's side. It worked, and could not scale — you cannot ship a table.
Android is at beta 1 and tested on physical hardware with real groups. Linux (.deb and .rpm) and Windows (.msi, a -setup.exe, and a portable .zip) are
published as early alpha and, by the developer's own statement, have only ever
run on his development machines. SHA256 checksums are published alongside the
artifacts; the Windows installers are not code-signed, on the stated grounds
that a signing certificate is another recurring fee and the checksums plus
AGPL source are the things worth trusting. macOS is pre-alpha with nothing
downloadable, and the web version — architecturally a paid-tier feature, since
a browser cannot do local-only BLE peer-to-peer — has not been started.
iOS may never ship, and the developer is blunt about why: Apple charges $99 per year per developer ($299+ for companies) for any distribution to iPhone users, not merely an App Store listing, and this is free AGPL software with no revenue attached. He describes paying Apple in perpetuity to give away his own open source work as "ludicrous," and says if iOS ever happens it will likely be the one paid build of an otherwise free app, priced only to cover Apple's fee. The app is deliberately in no store yet; F-Droid is named as the intended first submission once it reaches 1.0.
Prior art is credited rather than dismissed: John Stavropoulos's X-Card (in-the-moment but public and binary) and Monte Cook Games' free Consent in Gaming checklist (private and granular but frozen before play begins). The claim is that nobody had shipped private, granular, and continuous at the same time.
Source and releases: git.dev2dev.net/Dev2Dev/gameconsent_public. Full write-up with install steps: techtalkhawke.com.
The design decision of interest to this crowd: the free Basic Edition is deliberately serverless, and the shipped Android manifest omits the INTERNET permission entirely, so the OS itself will attest the app cannot reach the network. Everything runs over direct Bluetooth Low Energy between devices in the room. No account, no telemetry, no ads, no PII. The stated reasoning: anonymity is easier to guarantee when there is nothing to leak, and the Bluetooth-only transport also works in the rural, correctional, and hospital settings the developer's programs actually run in, where wifi is unavailable or prohibited. The developer notes he has spent years arguing that screens at the tabletop damage the social dynamics of play, considers the app an unresolved tension with his own research, and is adding audio alerts in beta 2 so a facilitator can run a single earbud instead of watching a screen.
The first working version of this was not software at all: green/amber/red LEDs and toggle switches hardwired into custom-built gaming tables, wired to a panel on the GM's side. It worked, and could not scale — you cannot ship a table.
Android is at beta 1 and tested on physical hardware with real groups. Linux (.deb and
iOS may never ship, and the developer is blunt about why: Apple charges $99 per year per developer ($299+ for companies) for any distribution to iPhone users, not merely an App Store listing, and this is free AGPL software with no revenue attached. He describes paying Apple in perpetuity to give away his own open source work as "ludicrous," and says if iOS ever happens it will likely be the one paid build of an otherwise free app, priced only to cover Apple's fee. The app is deliberately in no store yet; F-Droid is named as the intended first submission once it reaches 1.0.
Prior art is credited rather than dismissed: John Stavropoulos's X-Card (in-the-moment but public and binary) and Monte Cook Games' free Consent in Gaming checklist (private and granular but frozen before play begins). The claim is that nobody had shipped private, granular, and continuous at the same time.
Source and releases: git.dev2dev.net/Dev2Dev/gameconsent_public. Full write-up with install steps: techtalkhawke.com.
