Comment by nicpottier

I take your points around Signal but I think your priorities may be different than others. IE, I care more about an open standard being created for E2E encrypted chat that lets you pick your own home server than I care about Signal using Firebase Cloud Messaging. If Signal's standard was built to allow multiple home servers then we could each pick which client served us best.

It is a shame XMPP got lost in the shuffle along the way.

On the Firebase point, it is harder than it looks. I know this because we have similar problems as them (needing to notify our app to go sync) and basically Android has removed every other option for you to wake a device to do that EXCEPT for FCM. Every release has come with more and more ways they lock down background apps to now it being completely impossible for an app in the Play store to do anything but FCM.

So Signal doesn't have a whole lot of choice there, at least not unless they decide they won't be available in the app store which kinda sinks them as being a real competitor.

On that note, I think they do a decent job and I really do want to use them but they are behind on features compared to their peers and I just don't see it happening. Some of those are large moats created by the "free or nothing" philosophy. For example, one of the most useful WhatsApp/Telegram features is being able to share your live location for 30m or an hour with a friend or group. It isn't clear this is going to happen due to not having a good free map provider: https://community.signalusers.org/t/live-location-sharing/25...