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Comment by everfree | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good paid alternatives to Signal? Looking for: Good UI, E2E, shared source native phone and desktop apps, group support, reliable push, easy setup.

It seems to me that all the alternatives are either free and suffer from some of the same issues Signal does, or don't have all these features.

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Element on the Matrix protocol. Not perfect UX but keeps improving. Free but it has a solid business model servicing business cases with the open source set stack that suits corporate needs.

And you can host it yourself.

Last time I tried Matrix the message delivery was unreliable and E2E was a second class citizen with some big compromises. Has it gotten any better?

We’ve never had message delivery problems on Matrix (unless I missed something), and E2EE has been turned on by default since early 2020. You may have been on an overloaded server, or trying years ago.

It was a couple years ago, before 2020. Back then, I had an issue with delayed push notifications. I'll give it another try.

Delayed or even skipped notifications is still a thing. But a lead from matrix posted recently on another thread that these bugs have become a priority for their team. One can expect the bugs to be tackled as we go along.

E2e is not a second class citizen, and it is now enabled by default. And it works seamlessly across all devices. It's worth pointing out the seamless functionality because none of the other popular supposedly e2e encryption messengers actually are e2e. So matrix is superior now to skype/whatsapp/signal/telegram on that front.

Threema

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