Hey there! Just some background on the website release: it was never intended to be completely free of any Google Play dependencies – instead, all our builds have a fallback such that during registration, if we detect there’s no Play Services, we will fallback to using a websocket for notifications. Using FCM for notification delivery still provides the most reliable user experience and is something we’d prefer to use if the user has Play Services available on their device.
Concerning F-Droid, we already providing an auto-updating APK directly from our site, and we really don’t want forked versions of the app maintained by other parties connecting to our servers. Not only could the users using the forked version have a subpar experience, but the people they’re talking to (using official clients) could also have a subpar experience (for example, an official client could try to send a new kind of message that the fork, having fallen out of date, doesn’t support). I know you say you’d advocate for a build expiry, but you know how things go. Of course you have our full support if you’d like to fork Signal, name it something else, and use your own servers.
I think the rest of the discussion can happen on #9644. Thanks!
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Their reasoning is here:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9966#issuecomment-681943985
I never found the apk on their page.
https://signal.org/android/apk/