[Linphone-developers] setting up secure calling with linphone

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

I just wanted to relay some of my experience using Linphone as a secure
calling platform.  I just set up a bunch of people in Central and Eastern
Europe with https://ostel.co using Linphone on Android and iOS. Overall, it
went quite smoothly.  There were just the three settings that needed to be
changed (TLS, Outbound Proxy, and ZRTP).  I think the biggest barrier to
people was the language.  For example, many Eastern Europeans would do better
with Russian than English, but English is second choice on Android if an app
doesn't have the current language.

I've done a lot with Transifex, so I'm happy to help set that up. When you use
the 'transifex-client' app called 'tx', then it is really easy to sync the
files between git and Transifex. Also, the Open Tech Fund
(https://www.opentechfund.org/) has a pool of translators that we work with,
and I'd be happy to add linphone as an app that they translate.

Based on this experience, I asked https://ostel.co to recommend Linphone for
Android and iOS.  I've been using Linphone for a while now on Android and it
seems to work well.

In a related note, I saw that it is possible to provision Jitsi using a URL.
That would be awesome to have for Linphone as well.  For ostel, all that would
be needed is to set username, domain, TLS, Outbound Proxy, and ZRTP.  Maybe it
makes sense to also set the password via the URL.  Then the user would install
Linphone on their device, sign up on https://www.linphone.org or
https://ostel.co, then scan the QR Code, and make a call!

If we managed to get linphone.org's SIP service setup matching OSTN standards
(solid TLS, good ZRTP support, privacy policy that describes logging, etc),
and federating with OSTN, then we could have the easy one-stop service to tell
people to use.  We can say "use linphone to make secure calls".

.hc

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