It appears to be impossible to turn off the KDE connect application, as shown by the persistent notification never going away, including when swiping out the application window. Would it be possible to add a button somewhere to turn KDE connect off, so that it stops (I assume) multicasting (thus broadcasting the phone's identity) and consuming battery (though I don't have hard numbers on how much battery is consumed)? As far as I understand, the only way to stop KDE connect is the force stop button of android, and even then it'll come back on the next reboot… which is sad. Does this sound like a reasonable thing to add to KDE connect? Cheers, Leo
I've never noticed any battery issues with KDE Connect running and you can turn off the persistent notification in the settings.
I don't have any hard numbers either way for battery issues, as KDE connect probably doesn't consume much by itself and only hooks into requiring things that consume battery — so this part of the top post may be a non-issue, and this bugreport is mostly for the “leak the information that my phone is running KDE connect on the local network even when there's no computer I want to connect to” part of the issue. Now, maybe I'm mis-assuming how KDE connect works, and there is actually no such information leak? (Well, for complete transparency, I as a perfectionist wouldn't like having processes I have no use for running in the background anyway when I could just kill it and restart it next time I need it, but I also totally understand this alone is not reason enough to add a “shutdown KDE connect” button)
I think KDE is certainly a privacy focused Operating System so I think this might be a good feature request. Maybe something along the lines of "Only advertise KDE Connect when on these WiFi Networks" option and you can select which WiFi networks you trust. What are your thoughts on something like that Leo?
It'd definitely fit quite well a number of use cases, though I'm not sure whether it'd be possible to do so on android without additional permissions to read the wifi network names, which could maybe end up being repulsive? One use case that wouldn't be solved by such a solution would be when eg. giving classes, where one wants to use KDE connect to pass slides on the computer but not whitelist the whole university network, as it's not rare to be on the university network without actually giving classes and needing KDE connect — in this kind of situations, I see only an “on/off” toggle as a proper solution, as the alternative would be to manually add/remove the university wifi before/after each class. Now, for full disclosure, it's not a use case I personally tried yet (didn't give a course “physically” since trying out KDE connect yet), so I may be missing some data points that'd remove it altogether (eg. maybe the university wifi will break KDE connect anyway next time I can try it there)
I believe (certainly worth confirming) that KDE Connect on your phone won't broadcast it's availability unless the application is open. However an on/off toggle would certainly be good for privacy's sake just in case.
Hmm… but if that's the case, then why does it need a permanent notification even when not connected to a computer?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 427790 ***