"checking" does not prevent anything bad from happening. and if that file were read by a malicious actor, it would likely be immediate and you'd never even notice.
I assume this is directly due to the recent repeal of Chevron.
Correlation is not causation.
That depends on your threat model. What are you worried about?
I would’ve thought most desktop users just leave it running all day long like I do.
They do. OP is not a normal user.
It’s really not a big deal
For most casual users, it is a deal-breaker. And it's hard to get everyday people to use your software with roadblocks like that.
every time I open my email client.
You must not get email very often, this is absolutely a non-starter for me.
For gamers, it’s likely a 1-5 FPS loss
I highly doubt it... would love to see some hard data on that. Most algorithms used for disk encryption these days are already faster than RAM, and most games are not reading gigabytes/sec from the disk every frame during gameplay for this to ever matter.
How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this
Probably because Android (at least) already uses file-based encryption, and the files stored by apps are not readable by other apps anyways.
And if people had to type in a password every time they started the app, they just wouldn't use it.
why is this a concern again?