Why is Signal not on FDroid, or heavily use Google services?
Might as well use whatsapp in that case which is debatably on par or better than signal for encryption.
We don’t have any clue on how good whatsapp encryption is. It’s closed source.
The whitepaper explains it in detail. Closed source doesn’t mean worse by default. In a lot of cases the opposite since professionals were hired and paid for their work and the company thinks they have an edge on the competition. Open source is more of a grab bag. Commercial use of open source is plagued by abandoned projects and lack of support obligations, even though it might be better in certain instances.
there is a fork with proprietary dependencies removed called Signal-FOSS, whose repo you can add to F-Droid if you decide to trust it
Signal doesn’t “heavily use Google services”. They only use proprietary libraries and integrations for 2 purposes: Donations and push notifications. Signal uses the platform’s native way of handling push notifications, on iOS it’s APNs and on Android it’s FCM. This is also the reason why it’s not available on F-Droid. You can use a fork of the app like Signal-FOSS or Molly. These remove all proprietary dependencies and you can download them from their custom F-Droid repositories.
Molly is wonderful but I use signal-foss because it shares openstreetmap location by default 🤩
I have to be misunderstanding what you’re saying because it sounds like you’re happy that app shares your location by default? Or do you mean it uses that format by default when you decide to share a location?
Molly claims to use OSM in their FOSS builds: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android/blob/main/README.md#dependency-comparison. I can’t confirm this because I never use any Signal features that require map integration.