Do you know how one can send encrypted messages w/o revealing one's phone number?
I know one approach is to use disposable SMS numbers, but I'm looking for other methods.
Email is sufficient, it requires neither phone number nor contact sharing.
Caveat - Speaking as of about 3 years ago. Haven't used either recently.
I do wonder if it's all sorted out these days as this was about 5? years ago but now the momentum has turned to Signal there is little reason to move away from it.
Half the battle is getting people to use the same messaging platform.
I just looked last week out of curiosity. Apparently they figured it out sometime in 2019, and it had something to do with avatars. How odd.
Specifically, check the reply from LNFelton here - https://github.com/wireapp/wire-android/issues/777
Others have recommended Wire, which I’ve used for a few years until about two years ago. It doesn’t require a phone number, and an email address is sufficient. All chats are end-to-end encrypted and sync across all your devices (older messages sent before setting up a device wouldn’t).
There are some drawbacks to keep in mind with Wire: the company doesn’t care much about the non-enterprise segment. One of the side effects is that there is no way to export your chats (say, in text or HTML format) if you later decide you don’t want to use it anymore. You can only backup and restore chats on to the Wire app (and that also seemed to be platform specific when I checked it a few years ago). This means being locked in if you want access to the content. On the other hand, Telegram allows you to export chats so that you can have the content in readable form (say you decide to delete your account and save this beforehand). Wire also has a somewhat clunky Electron based desktop app (and you’ll know it’s Electron when you use it).
Another plus point for Telegram, which I haven’t seen in other apps that use a phone number: you can decide not to expose your account on Telegram to anyone who has your numbers in their contacts list (and allow only those you have on your contacts list to know, if you wish).