There’s something particularly paternalistic about this statement from the PM: “Your personal messages, calls and statuses, they will remain end-to-end encrypted”.
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Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.
This is a false meme spread because the Signal founder (who is no longer with the company) didn’t like people making forks without changing the API server URL and running their own servers.
Open source software doesn’t work like that, however.
Here’s one such example, which is also an interesting technical deep dive: https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/
As you say, I do remember them issuing some threats about it, so it would be interesting to know if they’ve changed their stance on this.
(Discord, as an example, has banned users for using alternative clients.)
Also, separately, the idea that you can only use a service with a certain client is dumb.
Imagine if a website said you can only use a certain browser, or they ban you. It’s ridiculous.