&gt;Apple Hires Developer Behind Signal, Edward Snowden’s Favorite Secure Chat App<p>A &quot;secure&quot; chat app that depends on Google Play Services (spyware) and is only available through the Play Store (rather than F-Droid, an open source software repository for Android) and maintained by an author who refuses to integrate fixes to either of these problems upstream.<p>For those wondering if Google Play Services really is spyware: one of the purposes is to backdoor your phone for Google so they can _silently_ update any of their apps on your phone. It has access to _every_ Android permission and can (and does) grant any permission to any app silently. It also monitors your location and reports it to Google, along with brief voice snippets for &quot;OK Google&quot;, as well as a list of all apps installed on your phone, and more. It&#x27;s definitely an awful thing to have on your phone if you&#x27;re privacy conscious.