Are suggestions?
So just hand the data right to them?
"I'm more concerned about Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Apple tracking me, reading my private conversations, and selling my data to the highest bidder."
End-to-end encryption is the only solution to that problem. Open source software and decentralization is nice and all but to become a mobile app it'll have to be compiled and run on a closed platform and will almost certainly use APIs of that platform.
I don't want something that is perfectly secure, I want something I can run on servers I control, so that every message I send doesn't go through, and be stored on, servers controlled by the big four.
TOX is a great example, as all the services like this try too hard to be perfectly secure, rather than trying to be user friendly. Most people just want something that lets them easily message their friends, and are willing to sacrifice privacy (quite possibly because they are oblivious to it) to have that.
Even OTR + ICQ/AOL/MSN Messenger were better than what we have now in terms of security and privacy, but people gave those up for simplicity.
That's not necessarily true. End to end encryption doesn't need to be a compiled mobile app or send messages over a closed platform.
We built a decentralized, open source, freely distributable, browser-based Twitter client utilizing end-to-end encryption at www.seecret.io specifically to address that.
Presently, mobile devices aren't (effective) general purpose computers. That must change.
[1] https://riot.im/ [2] https://matrix.org/docs/spec/olm.html
That's (UX) my biggest concern, honestly. UX is just too important, and it's becoming an increasingly fast moving bar. Simple things like hitting up arrow to edit your message, to more complex things like stickers and gifs, these are (unfortunately) requirements for me in my peer circles.
They sound silly, i know, but Telegram has (mostly) a great UX, and for such an important tool i can't currently give up features.. let alone convince my friends to likewise give up features.
(Fwiw, i love Matrix in design)
Granted it depends on how chatty a P2P system is and how much it depends on intermediate nodes for network assist. Ours is pretty idle when nothing is happening, so it doesn't impact battery life or bandwidth quotas very much.
The best design for a P2P network with more involved nodes would probably be to allow nodes to elect their level of availability to perform network assistance roles. Another alternative would be to build a network with two kinds of nodes: 'large' and 'small.' Large nodes could assist small ones.
It's a solvable problem. To some extent "you can't do P2P on mobile" is a dated idea that came from the era when phones were pretty tiny CPU and RAM wise, networks were slower, mobile OSes were more restrictive to background processes, and the battery cost of things like CPU and network I/O was higher. All these things have improved dramatically in recent (past 1-2 years) phone models. The iPhone 7 and the latest Samsung phones have near-desktop-class processors and radios have become more power efficient.
You do have to do a few things differently. One thing we do is to temporally group / quantize background I/O. Instead of sending packets whenever we feel like it, we do it in longer spaced batches when the network is otherwise idle. This saves a lot of battery power by causing the radio to only wake from sleep once for a batch of routine network traffic instead of waking constantly.
Things like OTR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging Actually stops these people though, and is even labelled in some of the Snowden Files as being "Catastrophic" to their efforts. But you are right, if they can't get chat on you they can just target you inside the Internet and send a malware payload disguised as an update to your browser.
Tech that provably prevents one will provably prevent the other.