But being based in the United States it is still subject to American laws, and that comes with the risk of potential American spying and embargoes. Software from any American entity (be it coorporation or non-profit) comes with that risk.
In that case it wouldn’t be “good enough”. But I don’t think this is such an all-or-nothing situation.
Don’t let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement
Not all of them.
I have a non-official chat group with some colleagues, and a chat group for the neighbourhood that are not likely moving just because I am refusing to use Whatsapp. It would just result in me missing out on those chat groups.
Currently I just have both installed, and that is also how I try to convince people to install and try out Signal.
But my goal is not to move to Threema, my goal is to move away from Whatsapp.
Signal fits the bill while expending far less social capital convincing people to use it.
Then by all means keep that momentum going.
I’m just looking at this from a Dutch perspective, where Signal is seeing by far the most growth.
Yeah, but Threema has basically no momentum behind it at all at this point.
I’m putting my social capital behind the option that currently stands the most chance of beating out Whatsapp
After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.
It’s still an American company, so it’s not ideal. But it’s still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.
WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.
The problem in this case is the Google Play Store, not Android.
Google is blocking Nextcloud from updating their app on the Play Store unless they remove this vital permission. But nothing is stopping Nextcloud from making their app available on third party app stores with the approriate permissions.
If you download the app from F-Droid instead, it should work correctly.
That is not to say that what Google is doing isn’t monopolistic. I’m just pointing out that you can bypass this restriction by not using their app store.
So that sounds to me that Americans should use a VPN to pretend they are accessing the website from Europe