because whatsapp is owned by meta, and their business model is to monetize our data. The agreement between google and meta is not public, but we can be sure it was to monetize our data.
It is safe to say, optional services get little adoption. Look at email, of the tens of billions of email addresses, there are orders of magnitude lower numbers of pgp or gpg keys. Similar experience with telegram encrypted chats. So having the option of e2ee in a communication platform, is not having it in practice.
I'm glad to see Robert Braxman has chosen iodéOS for the latest version (3rd iteration) of his privacy phone. The reason this is interesting is that it will include an os-based adblocker and parental control (without using the vpn slot! or invasive family link) for the life of the device, which is a big improvement. Expect to ship by march.
Iodé is a custom ROM, well liked here in Europe. It's got great device support, including a GSI, and you can uninstall anything by default, so no bloat, but comes with a complete set of apps if you want. I was pleased to see they're incorporating thunderbird, since it's already my default on desktop. so nice to see I can finally have it by default on android as well.
I am very happy with IodéOS (a privacy-focused OS based on Lineage) as it has a per-app firewall and adblocker built into the OS. A major drawback of "stock android" is that google itself has elevated privileges, which is a strong argument for degoogling android at the OS level. Until recently, it has been pretty difficult to find a degoogled OS for a given device, (less than 1%) but now with GSIs it's getting better: https://blog.iode.tech/what-are-gsis-and-how-to-install-them...
