With the lack of any other viable option, I struggle to see the point of the arguement.

Agreed. The Google implementations are there for folks who absolutely cannot go without certain apps only available from the Play Store. Upon installation, all that’s there is the OS with the necessary apps (camera, phone, browser, etc) with the security on these individual apps additionally patched.

With the sandboxing of Google Play and Services AND the option to further house these apps from the Play Store in a separate profile, you have a perfectly working device that the individual user can customise to their needs.

Its a great project and a real asset to the FOSS, privacy and security community against big tech/govt surveillance.

The phone is only as good as how you choose to set it up and use it.

My gripe with Greenify is its not open sourced amd has a bunch trackers. https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.oasisfeng.greenify/latest/

Use Pixel Droid. Download from F-Droid.

I am with you. I do wish we lived in an ideal world and in ideal times.

State-approved “peaceful protest” is not protest. This post is a criticism over the idea of state-approved dissent and isnt about condoning violence.

Unless you want to run communities there I wont bother with it. I feel everything from setting up accounts (anonymously) to getting people to join, works better in SimpleX and Session. I’d even be happy using SimpleX as my everyday messenger. Matrix is a little clunky and the fact that all conversations get duplicated on the primary Matrix servers is cause for concern.

With Signal and SimpleX, servers are used only for relaying messages beteeen users - messages which are encrypted on the device.

In the end you are going to be sacrificing something, and the last thing you’d want to sacrifice is privacy and security.

If I was pushed to list my go to, it’ll be Signal for chats with people I know: because its open source, battle-tested against adversities, and can be set up by anyone who understands how ro use Whastsapp / Telegram.

For communitties (and even as a daily text solution beteeen collaborators or anyone you dont want to exchange numbers with), I’d use SimpleX as it has a lot of in-built anonymity and decent privacy (so far - its a fairly new project).

Theres just too much fuzziness round Matrix for anyone to trust it.

Telegram is neither private nor secure. Its not encrypted bu default. Normal texts as well as group chat is stored unencrypted on its servers.

For everyday use with friends, family and work (assuming these folks already have your number), Signal may be the best thing out there as its open source both on server and app levels. Signal is also end to end encrypted (E2EE) with decryption keys stored on device.

For anonymous communications Session and SimpleX may be better as they are both E2EE and doesnt requie a phone number as an identifier.

Just chuck out Whatsapp, Telegram and all the other closed sourced garbage apps.

Out of curiosity, why Matrix and not these other options:

• Jabber/XMPP - has a creat client called Conversations (decentralised)
• SimpleX - by far the most anonymous and potentially decent privacy (centralised server)
• Session - a Signal fork without requiring phone number

• all of the above are listed on F-Droid