> The Viking Horde malware is bad enough... whether this is 'safely' sandboxed on a vanilla install or completely taking over a rooted devices is of little significance to me. I don't want ANY of it.
It sounds like you'd rather be using something more appliance-like like an iDevice. Their sandboxes are substantially more strict, and their permission system is actually more fine-grained than what you find on Android. OTOH, you can do far fewer interesting things on an iDevice than an Android device. That's the Security vs. Convenience tradeoff at work.
Anyway. This has no bearing on the fact that the infrastructure and services provided by Google through the Play Store are rather good and competently managed. It certainly has no bearing on the fact that distributing software through the Play Store is substantially safer and more secure than either distributing through a Market that has devastatingly poor code signing key management practices, or -even worse- demanding that your users download and install unsigned software hosted on arbitrary sites on the internet.
The truth of the matter is that distribution through the Play Store and the App Store is absolutely the safest and most secure way to distribute software to Android and iOS devices.
> I've provided numerous facts and backed them up with links to sources.
And by and large your "facts" come from antivirus vendors attempting to drum up sales of their now-pointless-on-the-fastest-growing-sector-of-the-computer-business virus scanning software by making mountains out of teaspoonfuls of dirt.
> What does all that great security you describe mean for all those people not getting updates?
You never actually investigated whether or not Google's split of core functionality into Google Play Services largely mitigated the security impact of laggard phone manufacturers. The answer might surprise you!
> A fair number of Android users like me are more concerned about the mass surveillance practices of advertisers such as Google...
Then, uh, why are you running an OS that's authored by Google? There's a saying: "If you don't trust the vendor of your OS, then you can't trust the computer that's running it.". By definition, the author of your OS has root privileges on any device that that OS runs on.
> We want Signal to protect us from Google, not the NSA.
Signal absolutely does not protect your conversations with others if a malicious party gains root on the device on which it runs. If you don't trust Google, then running Signal on Android is absolutely the worst thing you could possibly do. Seriously dwell on that for a while.
> Remote install capability via Google Play is huge red flag...
See above. Also, because Google does not have a copy of the signing key for Android apps that it doesn't author, it is impossible for Google to install rogue versions of apps that it didn't author. [0] When F-Droid was distributing their own copy of Signal, F-Droid used the same code signing key for all apps. This meant that they (or anyone who snatched the key) could push unauthorized updates to any software on the F-Droid repo.
> ...I understand Moxie intends to target more mainstream users and has to make compromises to serve them.
Heh. You haven't understood anything Moxie has said about why Signal is currently distributed exclusively through the Play Store, have you? :(
[0] Of course, you may not believe that if you don't trust Android's app signature verification code.