I don't know what it is you're talking about. The entire point of my comment was that I don't like animated gifs. They're distracting, bandwidth intensive, and could be easily replaced by a dozen better image formats.
And while I agree with you about animated gifs, I understand WhisperSystems reluctance to try and become the force that turns non-geek non-privacy-activist users (which they and I are hoping will widely adopt Signal) to find WebP or flif or whatever alternatives to giphy or where ever else they're finding their reaction gifs and topical memes and funny cat-riding-a-roomba animations from. That's how a _huge_ percentage of users want to communicate with each other. Moxy is trying to give them a secure way to communicate how they want to, not attempting to force them into new ways of communicating that have boring justifications like "bandwidth saving" or "animation format technical merit" as the only reasons why they can't have vast libraries of funny animations to send their friends... If they can't quickly reply with Ru Paul doing fingersnaps in Signal, they'll go do it on Facebook instead.
For that reason, I'm of the opinion that _not_ supporting animated gifs is significantly more counterproductive, if you're trying to become "the secure messaging mechanism the whole world will use" or if (like me) you'd like more and more personal communication to be exclusively between the participants, and not include advertising networks and data miners and sentiment analysers (and, yeah, law enforcement and government bureaucracy)...
Without emoji and animated gifs, I suspect 70% of my Signal contacts wouldn't use it at all. It's hard enough to convince some of my friends to use it at all, "Can't I just Facebook message you?"
For me, amongst my group of friends - it seems Moxy is making all the right security/usability tradeoffs.
If you don't trust PlayStore, it seems not much of a jump to say you also shouldn't trust Android.
If you're _rightly_ that concerned (and I'll note that Snowden recommends Signal, so I wonder what it is you're up to that makes you more of a nation-state target than him), I don't have a clue what your options are - I suspect they start with "don't use the internet at all"...