Conceptually, it’s a messaging app done right. Not haunted by legacy identifiers like phone numbers, can be run in a decentralized manner, and a more secure invite system.
In practice, it tends to burn through battery, and it’s already hard enough getting people to use Signal. People also seem to have a hard time grasping the concepts of invites, or anything that’s not a phone number for that matter.
I’ve stopped using it due to the battery issue and I don’t want to fragment my communication strategy further. It ought to have a privacy advantage by virtue of not needing a phone number, but at the end of the day, my messages are also getting swept up on the other end by non-privacy-respecting phones.
I do. It looks nice and is easy to use. My less technical friend wanted to use something more private than texting, and we decided to use it together.
I use it, although not with people who are new to encrypted messaging or who I really need to keep contact with.
SimpleX has great features for the separation of pseudonyms, which is part of why I think it’s the best concept for an encrypted messaging app so far. But it’s not only for-profit, but funded by venture capital. I don’t think it’s going to last for the long term, and if it does, it’ll probably experience a similar enshitification that other services have. Supposedly they’re going to profit by allowing businesses to pay for their service, but I doubt that they’ll actually make much money from that.
Removed by mod
Only things going for it is that it’s open source and auditable.
It’s venture capitalist funding is a hard no from me though. Same reason I stuck with mastodon vs Bluesky.
And it has been audited by an independent auditor. And it doesn’t have user ID’s. And you can have multiple accounts with no effort. And you can selfhost your own servers. And it’s actively developed. And it’s available on all major platforms. And the list of pros goes on.
I have to contend that the founders views don’t align with my own (or with most people on lemmy). But that aside (freedom of speech), I wouldn’t dismiss them simply because “VC bad”. If you want a different perspective, read this.
I have it and used it in the past. It’s better in privacy than Signal since it’s decentralized and doesn’t use any identifiers. Signal forces you to use the worst identifier ever: your phone number. It should be optional (as Threema) for easy contact discovery, not mandatory. Back to SimpleX, I stopped using it because every time you have to connect the computer to phone if you want to use it from computer (it’s for maximum security, but inconvenient for me). But it’s a great app.
