Also, if that were true, there wouldn't be a reason to ban Element or these other apps in the first place. Reproducible builds, combined with Android's develop

Also, if that were true, there wouldn't be a reason to ban Element or these other apps in the first place. Reproducible builds, combined with Android's developer-signed binaries, means that you don't _need_ to be super-vigilant to detect backdoors. You can investigate binaries after the fact (especially since virtually every version of popular apps is archived on third-party apk sites), and see that the signed build is not reproducible and at that point you can very easily dig into the binary to see which changes were made.