I have nothing against Signal. I just don’t have access to a phone number right now. I fully intend to use the Signal when I get a number. I know there is no silver bullet, no absolutes in the privacy world but I’m looking for any messengers that are generally considered to be private and secure on Android that I can try to convince my friends and family to use. I have a mid - low threat model, it’s just the thought of giving the Zuck anymore of my family’s data makes my skin crawl.
You could try Session. It makes a session ID like this . This can be used to contact people or for people to contact you. I’ve used it to talk to my SO a bunch of times.
Huge fan of Session. I think it really hits the sweet spot of being user-accessible (including iOS, Android, and desktop clients with notifications) with a solid encrypted messaging base using Tor-like onion routing.
I’ve been slowly migrating my friends and family over to it (with varying degrees of tech literacy) and have had few issues so far.
It has been a huge ask to get my family to use Signal instead of Whatsapp, they are somewhat tech literate. To change again to Session would be even more of a big ask, So I’m not going to bother 🤣🤣
But as you said the availability of Apps on all platforms, the ease of setup and the solid encryption is what makes it good. Its a shame that not many people know about it, same for SimpleX chat.
I like Element.
It’s a matrix client. Polished and nice. It’s ok all the platforms under an Apache license. No phone number required. You’ve got federation on matrix as well, so just sign up on any server.
Polished? No… don‘t bother with element if you want a good user experience. It‘s a buggy mess
First of all it‘s slow. Like really slow. Sometimes loading a room takes 20 seconds.
Nothing really works reliably. Currently I‘m unable to leave a chat for whatever reason. Sometimes (like twice a week) the encryption just breaks. Every single message gets marked with a red excalmation point, saying that the keys are missing. The app keeps telleing me that I have unread messages even though i‘ve read all messages. I then have to mark every chat as read a couple of times. Sometimes only clearing the cache of the app helps. That happens every day.
There is probably more but that‘s what came to my mind first
Oh yeah…the service has privacy issues too when it comes to meta data. I feel like the bottom line here is, that Matrix/element are not there yet. It‘s very much alpha software that is not suitable for everyday use outside of nerds that enjoy the pain.
