There are big wishes for Signal to adopt the perfectly working Flatpak.
This will make Signal show up in the verified subsection of Flathub, it will improve trust, allow a central place for bug reports and support and ease maintenance.
Flatpak works on pretty much all Distros, including the ones covered by their current “Linux = Ubuntu” .deb repo.
To make a good decision, we need to have some statistics about who uses which package.
Signal wants to provide updates themselfs to make sure they are fast in case of big security bug. F-Droid can lag behind to provide new version of app.
But they should at least provide F-Droid repo.
F-droid is only a few days behind at most. They are arguing against F-droid with evidence that’s out of date. I think it has more to do with laziness than anything.
The good news is that Molly exists.
Laziness is a very negative way of putting it. Another would be prioritisation - with limited budget, what is the best way to get as many people as possible to have their communications encrypted?
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It could be both. A highly private app that nobody uses provides less privacy than an app that’s only somewhat less private (i.e. has to be downloaded via Google Play or via a self-updating APK from their website instead of F-Droid) that millions of people use.
They could dump their existing code that let users SMS non-Signal users and upgrade it automatically to E2EE if the other number has Signal. Oh wait, that would worth adoption, nevermind.
That would’ve been great to keep, and the Signal team thinks so too, but they were kinda forced to remove it by Google: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms-support-from-signal-android-very-soon/47954/57