I would absolutely move to my Pinephone (Beta) as my everyday phone if there was a Signal app available for it. I find myself getting unreasonably irritated that one is not available. I know there are messenger options available, but my entire circle nearly exclusively uses Signal and are unlikely to switch. Anyone else feel the same?
Heh, nothing changes. When we started working on Ubuntu phone, people said exactly the same thing but about WhatsApp. Thankfully this one is easier to solve, and there are already people looking into arm64 builds of Signal, the desktop app - for mobile. There’s a couple of open bugs on the upstream signal-desktop github repo.
As for why there’s not a native app, I think that’s as you’d expect, insufficient users.
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Yeah, I know my irritation is unreasonable. I have been watching this project at well. I would settle for Signal via command line if I could get comfortable in the security.
Anbox appears to be the way to go though it might be a rocky ride.
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Thanks for that. I’ve been curious about Anbox for some time now. Getting it to work well could be extremely useful until native mobile Linux apps reach maturity, or so it seems at the moment.
@popey is absolutely right but then I can understand why people want to use their preferred messenger app even if it changes every now and then.
The thing is Signal is open source and WhatsApp is not and additionally Signal is a privacy conscious application just like my phone running Ubuntu Touch. So it would be nice to have that at least running on it. I could not care less about WhatsApp.
But we are a niche here anyway.
I use Session on Android and the Telegram web app on Ubuntu Touch.
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Having no signal app would mean no sessions app as well, right?
Pretty much.
Well this is a sticking point for sure, because they have stated that for visibility they prefer to stay on the store but they do allow you to download the APKs directly from them here. No such option for the iphone because you cannot side load apps.
But you can both compile the Signal Desktop app and the Signal Android app from source, so might try that for Linux based devices. You can even build your own Signal Server if you want to.
Oh and I did forget to mention Signal Desktop app is a flatpak as well. So hopefully if we can get newer kerenels on to the phones we can have a flatpak option too.