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28 points

Why is Signal not on FDroid, or heavily use Google services?

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-17 points

Might as well use whatsapp in that case which is debatably on par or better than signal for encryption.

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11 points

We don’t have any clue on how good whatsapp encryption is. It’s closed source.

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-14 points
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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.

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-4 points

Because signal doesn’t care about privacy or anonymity

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17 points

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

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-1 points
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Because they don’t seem to care about free software I guess

You can use Molly if you want more freedom. I do wish that Signal would build in orbot to avoid censorship.

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38 points
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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.

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14 points

Molly is wonderful but I use signal-foss because it shares openstreetmap location by default 🤩

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2 points

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?

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4 points
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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.

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13 points
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To answer your second question: they advertise Signal as a secure and private messenger, so heavily using Google services would be kind of counter-productive. To answer your first question: here.

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15 points

There are several Signal forks on f-droid that remove the need for Google services iirc.

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