Why do people assume Signal messenger isn’t spying on you? Yes, it has open source code, yes it uses end-to-end encryption. But we can’t check which code runs in the version from Google Play or the App Store. And also their APK (IPA) build process is essentially a black box, it doesn’t use GitHub Actions or some other transparent build system. I also heard from Techlore that they add a proprietary part to the apk to filter bots. The only thing I can assume is that people scanned the traffic coming from the app (Android), phone (iOS) and checked whether encryption keys were being sent to Signal or not. But it seems to me that this can be also circumvented. What do you think?
P.S. I myself use Signal to communicate with relatives and friends. Definetly not a hater.
You can use forks of Signal which removed the proprietary part. For example there is Molly (Hardened Signal) which has two version and one of them is fully foss.
It also lacks transparent build system (GitHub Actions, etc.). And I kinda don’t want some random (good?) guy to build this code. Better using original APKs for me 🙂