Hm, but wouldn’t such an application be malicious by default? Having protection against attackers on your device seems of out scope for a messaging application, at that point I would consider something like Tails. Though this may be a rare case when moving to an appimage could help matters.
Wouldn’t having full disk encryption achieve most of the benefits of that? In case of someone having access to your unlocked machine what is stopping them from launching the app and looking though it?
I think it sort of worked on firefox for a spell a while back but screen sharing and other stuff was broken. Then I think it stopped entirely and showed a “use edge” callout.
I switched to the electron client they provided and it used to work pretty ok for years but recently they anounced they were killing it on linux for some reason (to be fair there were no updates I could discern for months).
They now ignore linux entirely in the desktop clients section and redirect to a qr code to download the android app if you go to a download page on a linux machine.
I have chromium just to be able to get on a call if needed.
There is now “Teams Classic” and “New Teams” as well.
All this to say, yes. MS enshitification is real. Sorry I know you did not sign up to get this wall of text.
We set the threshold of sensible protections provided by the app (signal) itself differently.
On desktop having a gallery app, as you say, or running an application like windirstat for example I expect the user to understand that anything stored on device can be “seen” by the app and that, if they dont trust it, having sensitive files deleted or sandboxed might be prudent. Messages are stored at least somewhat encrypted (albeit with the key in a config file) so a random (non targeted/malicious) scan would gt blobs there.
On mobile due to how opaque the os is I am thankful for the extra encyption and I would consider it a much more critical flaw. On desktop less so. Still I appreciate your point of view and a passkey to encrypt at least messages on the desktop app would be a welcome addition.