When I tried it yesterday it seemed to use less memory than the Signal Chrome App solution. Even though I wasn’t using Chrome for browsing, memory usafe of Chrome+Signal was at around 200MB, no it’s using far less.
Concerning the Google Services: The rely on this services to send and receive their messages. Apparently, from a security and privacy point-of-view, this should be fine. If you absolutely DO NOT want to use Google Services, you can always use LibreSignal and there appears to be an official version of Signal that doesn’t use it (or at least a setting), but this doesn’t seem open to the public yet. At least a quick Google search didn’t reveal anything.
As can be seen, the other version requires <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.REQUEST_IGNORE_BATTERY_OPTIMIZATIONS"/>
, which indicates that in contrast to vanilla Signal it sacrifices power consumption for privacy.
@SgtAwesomesauce: I hear you. I’ve been trying to push people to Signal and i has been a sluggish but successful process. My course of action is to annoy them enough, e.g. I don’t stop talking about privacy and encryption, that they install it in order to shut me up Hey, whatever works xD . Aside from that I have many IT firends so Signal luckily was kind-of normal for all of us. That being said, there are a few people left (friends from middle school), who don’t use it, but we actually do not communicate that often. (Not as a result of them not using Signal, but rather as of living in different cities and stuff like that)