> Because the likelihood of an a-priori exploit hidden in AOSP is far more remote than the possibility of malicious exploitation, at some point in the future, o

> Because the likelihood of an a-priori exploit hidden in AOSP is far more remote than the possibility of malicious exploitation, at some point in the future, of the gaping wide security hole that is the "give Google root" subsystem. I am not talking about AOSP. AOSP does not ship Google Play services unless you try to squeeze them in yourself (which would be silly - why would you run a google-clean system and stuff google back in?). I am talking about versions of Android that come with Google Play services - that is, Google shipped or manufacturer-controlled-by-google shipped. (I sense that I may have misunderstood your point) > Yup. And that's unacceptable. You can't really claim to be security conscious if your product comes with the stipulation that you give a megacorp root on your computer, can you? Indeed it is unacceptable. However, Signal on a Google-powered android system is no less "backdoorable" if you avoid Google Play services. The only way out is to take a Google-less Signal, and put it on a Google-less Android. This is where OWS can start to get on my nerves, because they indeed do not want to make a google play services free version (Even if you do not care about security, you might care about the compatibility), and that they effectively took down libresignal. Their reasons for doing so were sound (dealing with uncontrolled, potentially borked clients on a protocol and service that is still evolving is quite a pain), but they could quite easily have abstracted these things away in the official Signal implementation so that things could work both with and without, especially seeing how security oriented they are. However, my problem with this post was that it took a Google Play powered signal on a Google powered Android, and started poking at how Google could backdoor Signal, when the ENTIRE system is under Google's control. I'm not saying that this does not matter until we have solved world hunger, I am saying that fixing this specific instance of the problem (Google Play services dependency of Signal) does not solve the specified problem at all (Google backdooring of Signal).