> not even every state actor has access to an NSA This is a massively undervalued point. As far as I can tell, most of the people relying on Signal/WhatsApp/Fi

> not even every state actor has access to an NSA This is a massively undervalued point. As far as I can tell, most of the people relying on Signal/WhatsApp/Firechat/etc for life-or-death issues are neither hiding from exes nor fleeing the US government. The bulk of use seems to be journalists and protestors in places like Turkey or Bangladesh who have reason to fear state monitoring of communications, but are unlikely to face deep or targeted attacks like having been served a compromised APK from day one. That Turkey example is seriously relevant. In 2013, the Turkish government created a fraudulent certificate allowing it to intercept traffic to all Google domains, potentially viewing things like gchat and gmail communications. This offered a whole bunch of lessons: - That the CA web-of-trust model is seriously broken, as we've seen repeatedly. - That even if companies secure their data and respect your privacy, non-E2E data transfer can still be unsafe. - That any software or data obtained under a hostile network without a prior signed session is unsafe. Play Store Signal installs in that time could theoretically have been compromised, but "app store versus dedicated download site" and "checksum vs. signature" were irrelevant; all four paths could have been compromised via the same attack vector. - That "secure download environment, insecure usage environment" is a major, meaningful category of use. That describes a journalist installing Signal in the US and flying to Turkey; an activist installing it prior to a regime change; or a protestor copying it from a trusted friend's installation. So you're exactly right: Signal isn't a complete solution for an adversary with unlimited resources and direct access to every layer of a network, but it's still massively important even for dealing with most state actors.