I think this great software urgently needs to provide a password-protected backup. Unfortunately, I am not a coder.
People are installing Delta Chat on their phones using their BigTech email accounts; they like the app so much that, if they have another device (laptop, tablet…), they are installing it there too. That sounds like good news but, how do they take that backup file to the other device? Through BigTech!!
So, if that backup file is not password-protected, what is the point of using Delta Chat instead of BigTech when you are handing your keys over to BigTech?
first of all, welcome aboard and thanks for the praise!
[…] So, if that backup file is not password-protected, what is the point of using Delta Chat instead of BigTech when you are handing your keys over to BigTech?
you can handle backups completely offline. there is no need to route backups through some cloud at all. explanation eg. for iPhones: Import backup to iOS - Android is even simpler as most Android devices just act as an USB-stick.
apart from that - when doing backups through some cloud services, a password-protection would be nice, of course.
in fact, we are currently working on at-rest encryption (you can encrypt your database with newer versions) that will also help on encrypted backups at some point
Yes, there are many ways to do it. But Delta Chat has managed to spread the use of OpenPGP even for people who won’t see any problem in this backup file thing we are talking about, and they will use their BitTech cloud-drive, BigTech email or BigTech IM to move the backup file. I have seen how they moved the file to their new device using the same BigTech email they are using for Delta Chat.
There is another issue with this. App-Data is private, but exporting a backup places it on a storage that can be accessed by other apps. So a developer does not need to break the sandbox to access Delta chat data, when the user exports the data and stores it where all apps can access it.
