>Signal hates users who aren't total normies.
No it's the other way around. Signal is explicitly designed for normies, which is why so many people use it. I doubt they sat around and thought of ways to screw certain users.
>Just as they could easily offer a Google free version
Easily? There's no easy in maintaining and releasing two different versions of your app, especially for a small non-profit.
It's just two compilation profiles, at least thousands of minuscule open source projects do it
Sure, but adding another target still increases maintenance burden. QA, e2e testing, acceptance testing, release engineering, etc.
That said I also wish they had a degoogled version.
It's just about not using some Google library, not that much more testing would be needed, nor maintainance or "release engineering".
I'd take an untested version over nothing, anyhow.
And I'm not sure that the current version undergoes that much testing, bugs are not very rare.
Hates users who are not total normies and designed explicitly for normies are not opposite. In fact an app that hates not normies would be designed for explicitly for normies.
> Easily? There's no easy in maintaining and releasing two different versions of your app, especially for a small non-profit.
It's literally just another job on your CI. They got a 50 million seed donation in 2017 and reported almost 30 million in revenue in 2024. They are not exactly small. If they were VC founded and not a non profit they would be a unicorn.
>reported almost 30 million in revenue in 2024
You're misreading. In 2024 they had $415k of revenue against $1.4 million in expenses, with $28.7M in assets (which I assume is what you're confusing). Assets have been steadily declining since 2022 as expenses have been consistently higher than revenue.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/816...
> They got a 50 million seed donation in 2017 and reported almost 30 million in revenue in 2024. They are not exactly small. If they were VC founded and not a non profit they would be a unicorn.
The donation to Signal and VC investment are very different things: Donations to Signal are for operating costs. VCs invest for the purpose of enabling and owning a share of exponential growth to 'unicorn' status.
> unicorn
Unicorns are billion dollar companies that are rapidly growing. Signal isn't close to that.