I have nothing against Signal. I just don’t have access to a phone number right now. I fully intend to use the Signal when I get a number. I know there is no silver bullet, no absolutes in the privacy world but I’m looking for any messengers that are generally considered to be private and secure on Android that I can try to convince my friends and family to use. I have a mid - low threat model, it’s just the thought of giving the Zuck anymore of my family’s data makes my skin crawl.
Self host your own istance of Matrix
Session
Signal is great, Element (matrix) is great, but I personally think SimpleX did a fantastic job so far, and I really want them to succeed.
SimpleX seems cool, never heard of it before (they have bad SEO, I think the name doesn’t help)
Only thing that keeps me from using it right now is the missing multi device support. But apparently, that is something the devs want to implement sometime.
Have to keep an eye on it, thanks!
While SimpleX is good for small groups, unfortunately it doesn’t really have desktop apps yet.
I do have something against signal! Phone number, removing SMS support, MobileCoin, lack of federation…
Sadly, my friends/family are sick of swapping and I’ve found element/session to be unreliable or overly complex, so I stick with Signal because it’s still much better than SMS.
ive heard briar and session are good
You could try Session. It makes a session ID like this
. This can be used to contact people or for people to contact you. I’ve used it to talk to my SO a bunch of times.Huge fan of Session. I think it really hits the sweet spot of being user-accessible (including iOS, Android, and desktop clients with notifications) with a solid encrypted messaging base using Tor-like onion routing.
I’ve been slowly migrating my friends and family over to it (with varying degrees of tech literacy) and have had few issues so far.
It has been a huge ask to get my family to use Signal instead of Whatsapp, they are somewhat tech literate. To change again to Session would be even more of a big ask, So I’m not going to bother 🤣🤣
But as you said the availability of Apps on all platforms, the ease of setup and the solid encryption is what makes it good. Its a shame that not many people know about it, same for SimpleX chat.
Simplex, element(or most matrix compatible messengers) session, bchat. If the goal is to get your family to switch over though good luck.
I guess Matrix would be your best option then. I use Schildichat as client, which is a fork of Element with some extras.
But if you can’t get a plan, why not get a prepaid burner SIM? You can buy a prepaid card for minimal amount and you generally keep the number at least for a year, and you put in 5~10 euro each year you can keep it active endlessly.
A lot of things require a phone number. Here, the goverment needs you to have one, but also most workplaces and even the DHL. Getting a cheap trow-away sim isn’t a bad option. Especially since pre-paid SIMs aren’t connected to your name like those on a plan are.
I have used Matrix; XMPP; Session and Jami. I like all of them but use Matrix the most as my wife prefers it and I message her the most. I have heard good things about Delta Chat but haven’t gotten around to trying it yet.
XMPP. It’s an old standard, there are servers you can get an account with or you can host your own. And with OMEMO encryption everything is end to end encrypted.
Try Conversations https://codeberg.org/iNPUTmice/Conversations
I like Element.
It’s a matrix client. Polished and nice. It’s ok all the platforms under an Apache license. No phone number required. You’ve got federation on matrix as well, so just sign up on any server.
Polished? No… don‘t bother with element if you want a good user experience. It‘s a buggy mess
Element has come a LONG way during the pandemic. If you haven’t tried it recently, I’d encourage you to give it another shot.
I mean I don‘t want to discourage anyone from trying it out. I believe that the protocol is the future of messaging and I really want this to be the next big thing. But you need some masochism to acutally use it day to day. It‘s just not there yet. But give it a shot.
I use it everyday on 3 different devices and it‘s a mess. :D
Oh? Tell me more. How is it buggy if I may ask?
First of all it‘s slow. Like really slow. Sometimes loading a room takes 20 seconds.
Nothing really works reliably. Currently I‘m unable to leave a chat for whatever reason. Sometimes (like twice a week) the encryption just breaks. Every single message gets marked with a red excalmation point, saying that the keys are missing. The app keeps telleing me that I have unread messages even though i‘ve read all messages. I then have to mark every chat as read a couple of times. Sometimes only clearing the cache of the app helps. That happens every day.
There is probably more but that‘s what came to my mind first
Oh yeah…the service has privacy issues too when it comes to meta data. I feel like the bottom line here is, that Matrix/element are not there yet. It‘s very much alpha software that is not suitable for everyday use outside of nerds that enjoy the pain.
It used to be very buggy, but it’s gained a lot of polish recently, especially if you haven’t used it since Spaces were introduced. Sometime before then I think the cross verification/signing user flow for E2E key management also greatly improved with the introduction of QR and emoji based cross-device verification for syncing encryption between existing signed-in sessions to newly signed in devices. The only bug I ever notice these days is the “mark as read” quick action in android notifications being broken on notifications older than a couple hours.
I use it everyday and it‘s still an absolute mess of a service.
Literally nothing works reliably :D
To be fair it might work a little bit better on android than on iOS and Desktop but the people I chat with that use android complain about the same shit.
Aside from signal I would say your options are Simplex or Briar.
briar is pretty decent. no voice/video, but solid and quite private with multiple ways of getting messages out in hostile network environments.
edit to say: its also completely p2p using Tor rendezvous points with no centralization at all.
