Thanks for the details, time flies, the project moves on. I’m a bit sad - it came so close to being useful for me and so close to what I outlined back in the 90s, but the whole “we did a focus group and people didn’t understand keys” thing seems destined to be an terminal albatross around the neck of the community for years to come.
The open source community supporting email is so thin on the ground these days, I have little hope of an “advanced user” version of Delta Chat getting enough traction to survive, though the relatively trivial steps needed to handle key insertion certainly hint at the possibility of developing a simple auxiliary app for real key management (the trivial steps needed to extract a private key are rather terrifying).
I checked the FAQ at FAQ - Delta Chat and it still talks about importing keys and still advises removing password protection if needed.
Removing the import facility will address the murdered activist bug in the current advice to remove password protection to enable importing of a key - A usable idea for PGP keys with a passphrase - #14 by gessel - not the solution I was hoping for but better than leaving the current advice in place.
The new(ish) integration in Thunderbird seems to be novice usable without completely crippling GPG’s utility and might be a model UI for an auxillary app, though it seems like it would have to flush the keys out of the database in the same way that Open Keychain does out of memory lest an adversary also discover how trivial it is to export a private key from Delta Chat. A “DeltaSecure” app seems, at least superficially, a tractable solution. Side project…