What you're saying isn't wrong, but it misses the point. I'm not saying, "you have to trust someone so you shouldn't use it". I'm questioning whether the E2EE i

What you're saying isn't wrong, but it misses the point. I'm not saying, "you have to trust someone so you shouldn't use it". I'm questioning whether the E2EE is adding anything or if it's security theatre. Take the case of WhatsApp. Without E2EE, you have to trust the platform (Apple) and the people behind the app (Facebook). With E2EE, you still have to trust Apple, but you also still have to trust Facebook, since Facebook controls the endpoint and you have no insight into what it does or if there are any back doors. The same applies to Signal obtained from the App Store or (AFAIK) Google Play. And Apple's E2EE stuff is obviously not adding anything, since we're already trusting them as the OS vendor. Something like Signal on the desktop is different though. There, we still have to trust the OS vendor, but we and anyone else can inspect the source code, verify that it does what it's supposed to and doesn't have any back-doors, compile it for ourselves, and then we can exchange messages without trusting Signal. In the case of Signal on the desktop, E2EE lets us distrust the Signal organisation, which has value even though we still need to trust our OS and our hardware. You could argue that we should trust the Signal organisation. That's not unreasonable, but that still makes E2EE no better than normal client-server encryption a la TLS and the promise of a solid no-logging policy. (We could also discuss the feasibility of verifying that there are no back-doors purely from reading source code and how well a back-door could be hidden. But that's sort of a tangent.)