A prime one is that the entity that you (have no choice but to) trust today will eventually turn against you at some point down the road.

• How does that change with federation, you always trust someone. Why should I trust the shady person running software on their basement, even if you self host, you are trusting the developers not to ship bad or poorly written code.

using a 3rd party client is against Signal's ToS

As far as it being against signals tos, molly exists and had not received any problems from the signal foundation to my knowledge, discord has the same clause and they don't seem to give a rats ass. Sure they could enforce it but they don't, and personally with how matrix clients are handled they have mixed security, fluffychat has security issues ranging from outdated SDK versions to quite literally ddosing homeservers because of a non-existent rate limit.

pushing controversial features like crypto payments

The crypto stuff wasn't great but you know what's cool? You don't have to use it. Simple as that. You don't have to engage with it and you and I both know that. It's buried in settings and you have to find it yourself.

Signal is an entity that's incorporated in a jurisdiction and might be compelled by law or to degrade its encryption to comply with the local regulator.

• I've always used integrity as a metric as to how trustworthy a service is, and in terms of signals e2ee, they've never lied about it, it's been proven in court multiple times not having any data on their users, no government can compel anyone or any company for things they don't have. Signal had everything to lose by lying about their encryption and nothing to gain, so why would they? Why would any company take a huge chance at a death blow just because? Signal is a non profit so they don't have any incentive to degrade it, they would be dead tomorrow if they got caught.

Using a centralized service like Signal makes you an easily identifiable/prime target in such a scenario.

Signal is not an anonymity tool, and has never been advertised as such, if you need anonymity, signal is not a good choice. You can make it more anonymous by using a burner phone but that's a different topic.

No matter what Signal says, nobody but themselves can verify what code runs on their servers

• You can't really confirm what any software can or cannot do, even if it runs on your system. Open source software is bound to the same principals of code, it will do exactly what you tell it to do, even if it is not intended (a 0-day, bug, etc.). Thousands of people constantly are monitoring the Linux kernel and it is still found to have tons of 0 days baked in due to it running a fuck ton on ring zero. You can't just inspect code and know exactly what it's doing, unless it's a hello world program it gets quite complicated. Verified safety numbers also make sure that no man-in-the-middle attacks can take place, making conversations even more trustworthy and still not trusting any server.

As far as I understand the American law, any agency could tap into that, either directly, or via Amazon on which the whole thing is running.

If everything is encrypted, what could Amazon tap? You do realize sealed sender and PFS take away any trust from the server correct? It's all encrypted, your aren't trusting the server at all, it's completely trust-less, and unless you think Amazon or governments can at this very moment tap any encrypted data and decrypt it, I would recommend taking a walk outside and realize that no one, NO ONE can decrypt current encrypted standards.

Unless you can point me to a reputable article showing in great detail that signal is lying about their e2ee claims then I'll rest my case. Signal has been proven time and time again to not have any data on their users except the minimum required for the service to work, that's called integrity.

Also there will always be someone you trust on the internet, nothing will change that unless we completely rethink how the internet works.

Edit: added quotes Edit 2: added extra info

Freedom from what? Good security practices? Open source does not equal security nor freedom. You're pedaling digital politics instead of fact based privacy and security. Trust me I'd love my apps to be open source but ignoring blatant security issues is going to put someone at risk. You can't have privacy without security and vice versa.

edit: like I mentioned previously, use obtainium and you can still use open source software

It's only encrypted in a BFU state, (before first unlock). Police can probe your phone for data using a tool by cellebrite without root. GrapheneOS includes a auto rebooting feature to place it back in a BFU state but other phones will lack this feature. Using Molly's database lock allows you to not trust the OS itself by encrypting it.

edit: corrected cellbrite to cellebrite

Wdym anti features? The only thing fdroid does is take the developer APK, sign it themselves and release it. If any anti features exist (I assume you're talking about the anti features tab in the fdroid app) it won't make any difference where you obtain it as fdroid doesn't do code checks. They only check to make sure it's under a open source licence. Fdroid adds no protection to any apps and you trust them to ship clean packages. If you get packages from the developer and they sign it and it happens to be malicious it's only one app instead of all your apps you have from fdroid. You trust them a lot and I'd recommend reading this if anyone is interested. https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/

I wouldn't recommend using fdroid due to security concerns. When you download a fdroid so it is signed by fdroid instead of the developer, what this means it's if fdroid gets hacked all your fdroid apps are insecure and can receive malicious updates. You also trust fdroid as another party in the chain, when in reality you should remove as many parties as possible. They also tend to host outdated apps with no updates in years. Use obtainium as it will pull directly from the developers GitHub page and will be signed by the developer instead.

I agree, the features apple does implement do tend to be more polished or at the very least not annoying to the user.

I think part of the "it just works" definition is the default apps should work without missing features, however you're not wrong, alternatives do exist.

Edit: spelling

Well it tends to come up for me because I'm the tech person around the house and at work, so phone and other device / software recommendations tend to come my way. I don't really care what phone you use, I ain't that much of a prick.

To be fair, unlike previous years iphone releases I've seen more skepticism than normal. I fully expected diehard apple users to be resenting the removal of the lightning connector due to excess charging cables. And while those comments exist, it is a very small minority of people. However with that said I don't fully understand the mindset of buying a phone that has limited or obsolete hardware / software. (ergo headphone jack, ergo missing software feature, ergo USB 2.0 from 23 years ago)

Samsung in terms of security, privacy and hardware is a total mess. I would avoid Samsung products at all costs.

By far windows, windows lacks or doesn't fully utilize features like full verified boot, sandboxing which means even if a program installs itself it still has to ask for permission for mic, camera, etc. Adding on to the issues even the programs themselves can be unsafe. Running a program that uses a memory safe programming language is pretty rare and a lot of vulnerabilities come from memory allocation and buffer overflow bugs. Android attempts to mitigate these issues by sandboxing every app, all phones ship with verified boot and full disk encryption, and usually have a memory allocator of sorts. And if you run a degoogled ROM you'll mitigate the privacy issues by not having Google play services installed.

If you need some way to monitor these devices as an admin there are apps on android that allow this functionality, iOS has similar admin features.

edit: typos edit 2: added information