There's a few clients for Signal, nobody is preventing developers from creating apps; there's Molly, gurk-rs, Axolotl, Flare, signal-cli, Pidgin (with the Signal plugin.

The problem is 3rd party clients don't implement all features because it takes a lot of work and they're created/developed by volunteers - just take a look at Matrix and how many clients support all features or even just group end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Last I checked many third party Matrix clients didn't support encrypted group messages, primarily just Element, the reference client built by the matrix developers. So you have the same problem on Signal that you have on Matrix.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In Matrix a direct chat is a group chat with two people.

Also I've used several clients and they all supported encryption.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In Matrix a direct chat is a group chat with two people.

You're right, I forgot how Matrix handled messages and the current state is that there's are at least 6 other clients that support E2EE - this is awesome.

That said, as soon as you look for a stable client that supports other features like Native 1:1 calls and Threads the only client listed is Element, check here: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

Side note: Looks like ~3 years ago a Fluffychat dev stated they would not implement E2EE in the app [0], this must have been around the time I was looking at other clients because I recall this one "looking" the best and might be viable for non-techy people to use/recommend. I'm glad they changed their mind and implemented E2EE. Time to take a look at it again.

[0] https://gitlab.com/KrilleFear/fluffychat/-/issues/25#note_423061121

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There isn't a call feature completely specified as far as I can find. Therefor it isn't really possible to have cross client native calls.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

It was introduced two years ago: https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/

Looks like at least two other clients support 1:1 calls.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Do any of these also support SMS? I'll switch back if I can have my encrypted message comingle with my SMS messages. Signal dropping SMS was the primary reason I left.