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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Android and desktop only, so most people I know won't be able to use it on the only device they message on.

If you're speaking about iOS, the dev just tweeted this: https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/14088573160870584...

> The answer to why is there no Mac/iOS version of Cwtch / why does Cwtch not have feature X is that last year we raised only a fraction of our donation target. You can help change that!

> @OpenPriv is powered by hundreds of individual donors just like you!

> https://openprivacy.ca/donate/

They are competing with Signal (and also every other insecure messenger like WhatsApp and Telegram), and Signal already exists.

Cross-platform support is table stakes for a messenger. This will likely go the way of Ricochet.

Decentralized vs Centralized is the competition. Cross platform is a goal, but, I believe, user privacy comes first for Cwtch.

The status of Cwtch right now is probably more analogous to Moxie’s work on Axolotl before he launched Signal: a boundary-pushing messaging protocol that looks promising but is not yet widely deployed.

A bit tangential but I'd be honestly curious how many people use iOS and explicitly value their privacy. Everyone has something to hide so we all care implicitly to a certain extent obviously, but for the real nuts (that includes myself), Android is the only OS where you get to both have the freedom to turn things off as you please (at the flip of a setting for most manufacturers, at least) as well as install regular applications. A Linux phone is fun and all, but much less practical.

With iOS you have to either be a leading expert in vulnerability research or hope that someone else finds a serious security issue in your operating system, leave it unpatched, and then exploit it yourself to get proper access and control your device.

I'd trust Apple more than Google to do the right thing any day of the week, but they're not some foundation with a mission. Cutting Apple out of your data is a lot harder on an Apple than it is to cut Google out on Google's platform.

Or just use a hardware firewall upstream of the device, which is what I do. My iPhone doesn't have a SIM in it.

Maybe talk to Apple, whom have made it increasingly hard to theoretically impossible for our type of privacy preserving app to run on iOS. We aren't the first, and Brair has been around a bit longer and has run into the same problem.

https://briarproject.org/news/2018-1.0-released-new-funding/

https://code.briarproject.org/briar/briar/-/issues/445

As an even smaller team with less funding, we have so far decided it would be irresponsible to risk sinking a sizable portion of our limited funds into trying to port to iOS when it may be impossible.

But if you really want it, please, donate, we need iphones, macs, dev accounts and budget for the research and work!

Talking to Apple won't change the circumstance that I am alluding to, which is that most people willingly opt for closed, centrally censored platforms.

You can't solve this problem at the application layer.

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