this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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Privacy
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I dislike Signal because they are many google play services, and do not try to distribute their app beyond Google Play Store.
https://signal.org/android/apk/
and if you want, you can use molly-foss to remove google notification services
I agree that there are workarounds, but I find it frustrating that Signal devs are ignoring very obvious security and privacy issues like this. It erodes trust and my enthusiasm to use Signal.
Just switched to molly-foss and am using mollysocket and have no issues
Was it just a simple switch or would I have to convince everyone to use Molly instead of Signal all over again? Like can I just get Molly and transfer over my contacts and history and all that?
Molly was easy enough, switching the notifications was a bit more painful. I found that the airgapped solution worked more seamlessly than the web server though
Signal is in F-Droid and works completely degoogled on Graphene with no Google Play. The annoyance is no notifications, but if you're rolling completely Google Play free, you're probably used to needing to just check several things a day for lack of notifications on multiple apps, since everyone under the sun is trying to shovel all your notification contents to Google (I assume for bribes of some sort from Google).
Not true. I have GrapheneOS with no Google blobs in a profile where I have Signal from play store (via Aurora) and notifications work perfectly. Signal itself will turn on the no google mode for notifications if not available.
This one is stick, not carrot: apps are generally required to use Google's notification system to be allowed in the Play Store.
Signal gets notifications without GMS. I think battery use and latency are a little higher. Molly, a fork can use UnifiedPush for better results.
It is not on Fdroid https://search.f-droid.org/?q=signal&lang=en
It's in the Guardian repo ala torbrowser
Many programs are in 3rd party fdroid repos, you can literally create a fdroid repo for Gmail and Gemini, you just upload apks to the server and run an indexer.
Being included in f-droid.org means the app had to meet some basic standards with regard to privacy. Being included in a 3rd party repo means that someone has uploaded it. And it's a case with the Guardian-distributed Signal, AFAIK it's the original version.
OP meant Signal not making any effort to be included in the f-droid.org repo, not Guardian not making effort to upload the apk from signal.org
I would be VERY shocked if The Guardian Project added Gmail alongside tor, but we all have different trust models...