TextSecure VS session-desktop

Moxie's reasons for disallowing Signal distribution via F-droid always rang a little flat to me ( https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127 ). Lots of chatter about the supposedly superior security model of Google Play Store, and as a result fewer eyes independently building and testing the Signal code base. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but independent and reproducible builds seem like a net positive for everyone. Always struggled to understand releasing code as open source without taking advantage of the community's willingness to build and test. Looking at it in a new light after the XZ backdoor, and Jia Tan's interactions with other FOSS folk.

Signal has documentation on how to reproduce their Play Store builds and compare them with what you've installed locally:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...

There's nothing on Signal blog as of yet, but Signal's git repository was tagged with v7.0.0 yesterday and we can see from the commit history since the previously tagged version (v6.74.4) that there will be a setting to hide one's phone number [1], as well as disabling the previous default behavior of advertising that one is on Signal to all their contacts already using it [2].

[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/8797236b5... (PNP stands for "Phone Number Privacy")

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/6097e6c30...

Signal works the same but without the user tracking from Meta/Facebook. Many people use it as well but I'm surprised that a majority sticks to WhatsApp.

Telegram and Signal solve this.

Sadly yes: Looks like an open issue 13290 for Signal, sounds like they were/are indeed still interacting through google's push notification service, wat, and per a link at that issue it was a chore for Tutanota to break away once they realised it was a problem some years ago (though at least they thought about it years ago? wtf Signal...)

Here is one: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reprod...

Rule 1: Posts to r/signal must relate to Signal.

https://github.com/oxen-io/session-android https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop https://github.com/oxen-io/session-ios

This is the correct place to raise feature requests and bug reports: https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/issues

We're at 1.10.8. Please update: https://github.com/oxen-io/session-desktop/releases

Session's reasoning seems much more... cagey. Telling people to recreate their identities themselves sounds a little like the Threema stopgap solution, but it's much sloppier (I can't imagine end users WANT to recreate their account and communicate this to all their contacts via a third party). They're talking about implementing this eventually, but the ticket for doing so was closed right after saying this.

Session F-Droid (version 1.15.4): Encrypted private messenger

Or Briar, Session, Tox, Element/Matrix, Jami...