Indeed. Having a company behind it is a central point of failure. It should be pure math and code.
I will look into SimpleX.
Still I find bending the knee at the first signs of resistance a sign of weak character. Perhaps disbanding the company behind Signal and distributing the source code everywhere would be the better answer.
Isn’t the whole point of Signal exactly to be useful inside these authoritarian regimes, with it’s end-to-end encryption? Then why would you pull out of the market, when the use case finally has it’s time to shine?