&gt; The Viking Horde malware is bad enough... whether this is &#x27;safely&#x27; sandboxed on a vanilla install or completely taking over a rooted devices is of little significance to me. I don&#x27;t want ANY of it.<p>It sounds like you&#x27;d rather be using something more appliance-like like an iDevice. Their sandboxes are <i>substantially</i> more strict, and their permission system is actually more fine-grained than what you find on Android. OTOH, you can do <i>far</i> fewer interesting things on an iDevice than an Android device. That&#x27;s the Security vs. Convenience tradeoff at work.<p>Anyway. This has no bearing on the fact that the infrastructure and services provided by Google through the Play Store are rather good and competently managed. It <i>certainly</i> has no bearing on the fact that distributing software through the Play Store is <i>substantially</i> safer and more secure than either distributing through a Market that has devastatingly poor code signing key management practices, or -even worse- demanding that your users download and install unsigned software hosted on arbitrary sites on the internet.<p>The truth of the matter is that distribution through the Play Store and the App Store is <i>absolutely</i> the safest and most secure way to distribute software to Android and iOS devices.<p>&gt; I&#x27;ve provided numerous facts and backed them up with links to sources.<p>And by and large your &quot;facts&quot; come from antivirus vendors attempting to drum up sales of their now-pointless-on-the-fastest-growing-sector-of-the-computer-business virus scanning software by making mountains out of teaspoonfuls of dirt.<p>&gt; What does all that great security you describe mean for all those people not getting updates?<p>You never actually investigated whether or not Google&#x27;s split of core functionality into Google Play Services largely mitigated the security impact of laggard phone manufacturers. The answer might surprise you!<p>&gt; A fair number of Android users like me are more concerned about the mass surveillance practices of advertisers such as Google...<p>Then, uh, why are you running an OS that&#x27;s authored by Google? There&#x27;s a saying: &quot;If you don&#x27;t trust the vendor of your OS, then you can&#x27;t trust the computer that&#x27;s running it.&quot;. By definition, the author of your OS has <i>root privileges</i> on any device that that OS runs on.<p>&gt; We want Signal to protect us from Google, not the NSA.<p>Signal <i>absolutely</i> does <i>not</i> protect your conversations with others if a malicious party gains root on the device on which it runs. If you don&#x27;t trust Google, then running Signal on Android is <i>absolutely</i> the worst thing you could possibly do. <i>Seriously</i> dwell on that for a while.<p>&gt; Remote install capability via Google Play is huge red flag...<p>See above. Also, because Google does not have a copy of the signing key for Android apps that it doesn&#x27;t author, it is impossible for Google to install rogue versions of apps that it didn&#x27;t author. [0] When F-Droid was distributing their own copy of Signal, F-Droid used the <i>same</i> code signing key for all apps. This meant that they (or anyone who snatched the key) could push unauthorized updates to <i>any</i> software on the F-Droid repo.<p>&gt; ...I understand Moxie intends to target more mainstream users and has to make compromises to serve them.<p>Heh. You haven&#x27;t understood <i>anything</i> Moxie has said about why Signal is currently distributed exclusively through the Play Store, have you? :(<p>[0] Of course, you may not believe that if you don&#x27;t trust Android&#x27;s app signature verification code.