Well. I personally am very annoyed that i can’t choose a specific pin for signal. That means my kid can read my messages, because yes… Keeping password from a child is neigh impossible. But my pin for element, fairmail, telegram he don’t know.
So i get a lot of the criticism. For me personally, it’s still a matter of trust. A future malicious molly version might eavesdrop. Signal will probably not do so.
Encryption at rest on an unlocked phone is probably a hard problem. But if somebody is targeting me to that extent, i am probably toast anyways.
I try to create enough usage so that journalists and activists can hide in the mob, and i can hide from fang.
I use element, but do worry about the local server implementation and leak of metadata.
You will probably have tradeoffs. And somehow need to script accept that at some point, you need to trust someone. At the very least with firmware. And you probably need to change workflow.
I find cryptpadb works almost as well as Google docs did a few years ago.