The Signal Foundation has 50 million dollars.

And who is paying for Signal to be on Google Play?

google, facebook, whats app, microsoft. Basically the companies that pay for signal end to end encryption in their chat apps.

There are, I'm sure, apps that are better, and that's never been moxie's goal. He's said it over and over that he'd rather have encryption for the masses than the perfect messaging app. It seems disingenuous to assume that he's acting in bad faith when he's clearly doing exactly what he said he wanted to do.

If you want to make the prefect, self-hosted, chat eco system, fire up that matrix server and invite your non tech friends to join. I'm sure that will work out incredibly well.

In the mean time, Moxie seems to realize that to accomplish his goal and make communication incrementally more secure for average users, he needs to go where the users are.

It's crazy to me that people still think that secure communication is a technical problem. We've had GPG for the competent for a long time. The hard problems in secure communication are about using the eco systems that are available to large groups of average users and still being secure.

Pushing an app out to F-Droid is trivial. There is literally no defense for only using Google Play and unsigned binaries on his own website.

I believe that to use the same app, he requires google play? Am i missing something? You can export the app yourself from google play and it doesn't run unless you have google play installed.

Am I missing something?

Does "the same app" refer to Signal? If so, you an run it without having Google Play installed (though it will be more battery-hungry), and download the APK yourself.

Build the code yourself

Google Play is the default.

> Are you going to pay for him to do that?

I donated some money to them a while back. How hard could it be to push the binaries out to a second app store?

I published an app on F-Droid once: it is a very light-weight process. One gives them access to the open source repo where the code is with build instructions and they then take care of pulling updates and publishing new versions.

That process can be more complicated than it seems.

I tried to publish my open-source game on F-Droid, but the build process involves building native components with a specific third-party version of the NDK toolchain, as well as shell scripts to move files around, so it never made it to the store.