I have nothing against Signal. I just don’t have access to a phone number right now. I fully intend to use the Signal when I get a number. I know there is no silver bullet, no absolutes in the privacy world but I’m looking for any messengers that are generally considered to be private and secure on Android that I can try to convince my friends and family to use. I have a mid - low threat model, it’s just the thought of giving the Zuck anymore of my family’s data makes my skin crawl.
You could try Session. It makes a session ID like this
. This can be used to contact people or for people to contact you. I’ve used it to talk to my SO a bunch of times.
Huge fan of Session. I think it really hits the sweet spot of being user-accessible (including iOS, Android, and desktop clients with notifications) with a solid encrypted messaging base using Tor-like onion routing.
I’ve been slowly migrating my friends and family over to it (with varying degrees of tech literacy) and have had few issues so far.
It has been a huge ask to get my family to use Signal instead of Whatsapp, they are somewhat tech literate. To change again to Session would be even more of a big ask, So I’m not going to bother 🤣🤣
But as you said the availability of Apps on all platforms, the ease of setup and the solid encryption is what makes it good. Its a shame that not many people know about it, same for SimpleX chat.