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 They are arguing against F-droid with evidence that's out of date.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.

Use SimpleLogin and Bitwarden for everything. I never use the same email or password anywhere and can turn off receiving emails from the source for each account.

The way you posted this made it seem it was an official signal survey

I use warpinator to share between my phone, laptop and desktop at home. It uses the local network.

But yea, I use signal to share often, when I am out.

My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn't, SMS was fine because that's how I was going to talk to them anyway.

The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn't work with 99% of the other people in their lives.

They own and run a pretty large business. There's no way that they're staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they "should" do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.

Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.

You do realise that mobile data is non-existent or limited in some counties right? Even here in New Zealand mobile data is still limited or expensive and the main communication, especially between people who don't know each other, is SMS. Some encryption is still better than nothing.

They went from doing some communication secure with signal, to doing no secure communication, because of a rug pull of a genuinely convenient feature. The problem with communication apps is that it is almost impossible to convince anyone to use anything they haven't heard about, if it is not very convenient. They're not going to use a separate app just for communicating with a single person/a few people.

Looks like RCS might be viable in the future when it works on both iphones and androids though. I just hope that it doesn't all go through googles servers.

That's an understandable goal, but as a user, breaking the user experience when I go to send a file to someone only to find that I can't even see it in some apps is a deal breaker. If the app can't be trusted to do that, I won't use it.

Matrix, the protocol, is quite nice.

Element, the Matrix reference client, is too complicated IMO. If everyone were to only use FluffyChat, it would be great but then FluffyChat afaik doesn't implement every protocol feature and and you could end up in compatibility issues with Element users.

Purely as a client I find Telegram the most convenient. I think more should copy their homework from there, heck perhaps post the client to Matrix.