been using this for years.. it doesn't have the GCM crap and hence works on de-googlified custom ROMs as well. Surprised how many people don't seem to know about it.
> Surprised how many people don't seem to know about it.
There are a few reasons for that.
1. The link to APK cannot be found on the official site[0], so it needs to be looked up in a search engine.
2. Even when downloading from the site, they try to scare you away with a warning [1]. The reason for warning could be avoided by hosting their own F-droid repo, but they refused it, claiming you can download APK and not listening to reason[2].
Though for people using F-droid can still get Signal through the Guardian repository [3]
Thing about the signal APK and the Guardian one is that, it still have the so called "crap" in the final APK, it just runs a background service when required google services are not detected, causing battery drain for many[4].
The drain could also be avoided by supporting UnifiedPush (it can fall back to FCM when it's detected), but they don't want to do that either[5].
> Surprised how many people don't seem to know about it.
I'm pretty sure people just want to be angry. I mean look at how many people are arguing that updating is... bad. I cannot and will not take those people seriously. It's just such a laughable position.
There's also a great feature with this too. If you don't update for long enough then my chats won't transmit to a vulnerable device, such as one that is running too old of a version. Now that's a great feature
I'm not sure why they're doing it; anyhow, I'd at least avoid doing the initial installation through that repo, you're trusting an additional party for no gain that I could think of (updates are ok because the signature needs to match the one of the installed version).
Happy user for many years now, thanks for the support!