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Since the family didnโt want to turn off RCS, I completely changed the app instead๐๐๐
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Android
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Started using signal just in time for chat control 2.0 to drive it out of the EU ๐
Has signal left EU?
Quick search says they were threatening to leave, but didn't see anything to the effect that they had.
I comtemplated using Signal until I saw they you need the play store in order to use it๐
Molly is a fork that also has a FOSS version with proprietary blobs removed. They also have their own F-droid repo if you're not interested in the github repo.
https://molly.im/
My wife and I use Signal with each other. She also uses Graphene on her Pixel. Both were her choice. And now she wants to go further down the FOSS rabbit hole. I warned her it was deep. She's totally onboard.
How did you get her on board? Can your wife talk to my wife? Over signal ๐
She was getting fed up with the direction all the tech companies were going and started researching how to take ownership of her shit. I only found out because she asked me about Graphene OS, which caught me totally off-guard because she was an apple person for so long. We talked about it at length, then she decided to ditch her iPhone for a used P9PXL, and asked me to install Graphene OS as soon as it arrived.
She is incredibly sharp and is more than happy to struggle with figuring out a whole new world of privacy and real ownership than deal with forced "upgrades" that do nothing except harvest even more data.
Nice! Yeah my wide gets irritated if I even mention hosting something. She's still under the impression open source means poorly thrown together... I've self hosted things for so long, and I had a new pack of hard drives fail (4 out of 8) after moving about 50TB of data, so she sees how bad it can be to host; however, 90%of her stuff on her phone isn't backed up bc she won't let me install anything to help and she has no cloud storage.
She works for a big (in its industry) software company and of course is always fed the "little guys" aren't as good, etc. I'm chipping away slowly but surely. ๐ค
I donโt blame her. Itโs fun. My family is not on board with it unfortunately but I hope them seeing me do it might convince them someday
I think I'm good with Delta Chat for now ๐
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/releases
Though I do wish they showcased this on the main website
It is.
https://signal.org/android/apk/
It's not easy to find though
FWIW I used duck duck go and searched for signal apk and it took me there.
It is weird they bury it on their site though, I havenโt found a way to navigate to it from their page.
Ew don't promote GH, it tracks you a much as GP! Someone else linked the apk directly ๐
I also use Delta over Signal for my own reasons, but heads up:
Nah, download Aurora Store from F-Droid, now you have degoogled access to the Play Store.
BUT a word of warning:
You still have to be careful of what you download, it usually lists known trackers to help with that. And "requires google play services" is often actually not true, some things that claim that work fine or maybe just don't give notifications.
Never heard of delta chat. Glancing at it on F-Droid, it looks a lot like Briar.
Any commentary on a comparison of signal v Briar v Delta chat on features / privacy?
Never used Briar myself, but I like how Delta is decentralized and resilient to outages even supporting multi-relay set ups, easy to use for the "normals," it's private and secure, low (no?) metadata. Among other things I'm sure, that's just off the top of my head.
The ease of use is one of the biggest, I couldn't send someone "normal" a link or QR code and expect them to navigate through setting up XMPP or Matrix accounts, but with Delta I've never had an issue, I've even gotten near tech-illiterate people like my mom to do it. Signal is easy too, but was out for other reasons (mostly phone number requirements.)
It just makes sense to just download everything from Droid-ify and/or Fdroid ( almost all of my apps are from these two). Yeah but even with that, it can still get shut off. Idk. . I wouldn't risk it.
Yeah I do when available too, but if something I need isn't on F-Droid I'll use Aurora begrudgingly, just nice to have the option.
They also got a store called Aurora Droid. Its another alternative to fdroid. Now I don't know if it'll help with some apps from Aurora store but its another alternative.
I think that's just an alternative frontend for F-Droid, like Droidify (the one I actually use for F-Droid) is.
You don't REALLY but they also don't make it easy to use anything else.
I don't know... some of these apps I've been experimenting with, even with microG, of not work properly just because your not getting it from the play store. Also,with September being around the corner, I would try to stay away from google as much as I can.
It works completely fine without any Google stuff. It will just kill your battery and you'll have to check and update it manually.
Do you? i thought they had an apk available to install.
Besides Molly through F-Droid you can also get it through Obsidian from GitHub which I believe comes with a self updater anyways.
If you do want to use it, there's a security focused fork called Molly on f-droid. You'll have to enable their repository though.
I saw someone post the link but, One step at a time. My family is not on the FOSS journey like I am.๐
They do not need to be, as they can just use the AppStore/PlayStore release.
Maybe that's why SimpleX came along.
But they started diving into crypto tokens so they are on thin ice.
I'll take crypto over phone number identifiers