I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you much more “bang for your buck,” things like good passwords, two-factor authentication, and even encrypted email. That said, I still believe that encrypted messaging is a critical part of a well-rounded privacy and security strategy. While the vast majority of our day-to-day conversations may be benign, it can still offer a lot of insight into who we are as people – our routines, likes, and personal thoughts. This information – mundane or not – is worth protecting.
Another basic thing – If your messenger is throwing your messages in a notification; it’s being logged. Google was found to be logging almost all notification content. Make sure your message app isn’t putting the content of messages into notifications.
That’s if they use Google’s push notification backend on firebase. FOSS apps from F-droid usually don’t.
Tl;Dr install F-droid damnit
If the app implements their own notification system and doesn’t rely on GCM then Google isn’t able to log them as far as I know.
UnifiedPush instead of their own implantation would be better for power consumption ig.
Overall a choice between which Notifier you want to choose would be nice.
Between the apps own notifier and UnifiedPush (also has a Fallback to GCM if wanted)