Isn't the dependency gone now? I think I read something about using WebSockets instead, although with more battery drain.
Telegram doesn't drain battery at all and doesn't need Google. Not sure what Signal and others do, but of Wire I know that they drain battery as fast as if I had a game running constantly in the background.
Signal I'd use, but it (still) doesn't work on my phone because I've got many Google software firewalled. When reporting this bug years ago it was a WONTFIX. I also heard they removed that dependency months ago and I keep trying every few months, but Signal won't even let me confirm my phone number because it relies on Google so deeply, so I can't use it.
So unfortunately Telegram is still my messenger of choice: high usability, everyone has it, it's not owned by some big corporation and it's not of the USA, and optional encryption (for non-group chats) is better than nothing.
It's strictly worse than nothing. Opting to use optional end-to-end encryption basically shouts to your local friendly dictatorship, "Hey, look at this person!" Would you like that kind of attention? There are no such concerns with mandatory end-to-end encryption. It probably would be banned altogether, but that's a different problem.
I think that is a good thing, kudos to them.
The thing that would make me really happy is a play-framework-free build on f-droid. I'm not holding my breath, though...
f-droid would be nice, I agree. I did not really follow the whole political discussion about why moxie refuses to cooperate, but at least I can use signal again after some years without gapps.
F-Droid offers two options (a) they build your app, or (b) you use reproducible builds, they rebuild your app, and verify that it produces the same result.
Moxie raged that people should trust him instead of F-Droid for builds, so (a) wouldn’t be an option, and was awfully silent about (b), especially considering that Signal now has reproducible builds, but he refuses to allow that option, too.
Do you mean "signal"? Telegram is very specifically the pseudo-secure messenger shit-talking Signal and Marlinspike.
m(