You could also load the webbased element client in Chrome and use Matrix in Chrome. In theory at least, not sure how it holds up on mobile but you can definitely use it in Chrome desktop browser.

https://hydrogen.element.io/#/login works on mobile. It's their experimental light-weight web client.

Element, the matrix protocol, and matrix.org are all tightly linked together. Matrix.org is the default server in Element. With them so interconnected, I understand why matrix.org issues would affect Element.

Not that tightly linked. Whilst the Element client does offer Matrix.org as a signup/login as the first page you see, you're also just one single click from signup/login to any of the other servers. Nothing about that page really feels locked or branded to matrix.org.

I don't see how that makes Element responsible for matrix.org content. Thunderbird offers getting an email address via gandi.net in their new account page. Does that mean that Mozilla is suddenly responsible for all emails (like spam) coming out of gandi?

New Vector leadership holding key decision-making positions on both Element and Matrix.org could be seen as a distinguishing factor. It feels subjectively like more entanglement than the Mozilla/Gandi combo.

We’ve very consciously tried to separate The Matrix.org Foundation from Element (previously known as New Vector), despite both Matrix and Element being created by the same leadership (myself, my co-founder Amandine, and the rest of the core Matrix team). To be clear: we started Matrix in 2014 as a pure R&D project, and then created Element (then NV) in 2017 to keep the core team employed to work on it fulltime.

However, the non-profit Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation) was set up in 2018 with myself and Amandine deliberately in a minority control position (2 of 5 directors, called Guardians) specifically to address this concern - to protect Matrix from Element’s commercial activity, in case we ever went rogue.

As it happens, The Foundation farms out hosting and admin of the matrix.org homeserver to Element (which makes sense, given the Foundation doesn’t have employees and Element was already running the server), but if Element ever went evil, i am very confident that the Foundation Guardians would kick in and make a course correction.

But can you host content with chrome that will get you locked up for life? Because that's the issue here: the official default home server was serving that content. Now, yeah, decentralization but apparently the people handling abuse reports of stuff in the play store don't know what this means, hence GP saying they explained what decentralization is and the relation between Element (open source project) and Matrix.org (the 'offending' service).

I think this is the problem, if you treat every client as a host it becomes the client’s responsibility to police the host which is wrong.

Wait until Firefox gets taken down for the same reason and chrome starts blocking things

A better analogy might be your ISP blocking google.com because of heinous content visible on the search screen. Yeah it would be weird, but I doubt anybody would have a real problem with that happening.