Install OxPulse on Android.

What the app changes

Android suspends a browser tab shortly after you switch away from it, and it will not let a web page hold the microphone in the background. An installed app can ask for that permission. This one does, and nothing else:

• Your call survives leaving the app. It runs as a system phone call, with an ongoing notification, instead of being frozen when you switch to another app or lock the screen.
• It asks to be exempt from battery optimisation. Without that, Android eventually kills long calls to save power.
• It walks you through the autostart settings that Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo and several other vendors add on top of stock Android. Those settings kill background apps aggressively, and they are hidden in a different place on every phone.

What it does not change: it is the same service, the same account and the same interface. The app loads oxpulse.chat directly, so changes to the site reach you immediately — you do not need to update the app to get them.

Before you install

There is no Google Play listing yet, so this is a direct download. You should know that installing an APK from a website is structurally identical to how malicious software is delivered, and the warning Android shows you is correct.

We cannot make that warning go away, and we would not want to. What we can do is make the file checkable. The app is built by a public workflow rather than on someone's laptop, its source is readable, and every release is signed by the same key. The two checks below take under a minute and are worth doing.

Download

Requires Android 5.1 or newer.

Download the APK All releases, with notes

Check what you downloaded

1. The file is intact

Every release publishes apk-sha256.txt beside the APK. Download both into the same folder and run the line for your system. Both print app-release.apk: OK when the file is good, and say FAILED when it is not.

On Linux:

awk '{print $1"  app-release.apk"}' apk-sha256.txt | sha256sum -c -

On macOS:

awk '{print $1"  app-release.apk"}' apk-sha256.txt | shasum -a 256 -c -

This proves the file arrived unaltered. It does not prove who made it — anyone can publish a file and a matching hash. That is the next check.

2. We are the ones who signed it

Every OxPulse release is signed by this certificate, on every channel, and it will not change:

A1:CD:92:83:F2:3B:7C:AA:78:FB:62:BF:F3:BD:4E:C2
42:09:7C:18:C3:69:74:7A:6E:F0:9E:F7:42:0B:2E:52

With the Android build tools installed, compare it yourself:

apksigner verify --print-certs app-release.apk

If the fingerprint you get differs from the one above, do not install the file. Whatever you downloaded was not built by this project.

Install

1. Open the downloaded file.
2. Android will refuse and offer a settings screen — it only allows installs from an app you have permitted. Allow it for the browser or file manager you downloaded with.
3. Go back and confirm the install.

You can revoke that permission afterwards. It applies to the app you downloaded with, not to OxPulse.

After installing

The app will ask for a few permissions. Each one exists for a reason, and the call reliability you installed it for depends on them:

• Notifications — an ongoing call has to show a notification. Android requires it, and denying it means the call cannot run in the background at all.
• Battery optimisation exemption — otherwise the system stops the call after a few minutes of screen-off.
• Autostart, on phones that have it — Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, vivo and others. The app opens the right screen for you; the wording differs by vendor.

Updates

A directly installed APK does not update itself. There is no store to do it, so the app will not silently change under you — and equally, it will not fix itself.

This matters less than it sounds: the interface is loaded from oxpulse.chat, so almost everything we ship reaches you without a new APK. A new download is only needed when the native layer changes. Watch the releases page for those.

Read the source

The app is a thin native shell around the web client, and all of it is published under AGPL-3.0 — the foreground service that holds the call, the vendor autostart handling, the Bluetooth code, and the workflow that builds and signs each release.

github.com/anatolykoptev/oxpulse-android

The server and the web client are not open source. What that boundary is and why is written up on the open-source page.