The better comparison is to SimpleX I think, not Signal. And unlike SimpleX, Olvid is not fully open source.* Olvid also lacks clients for all the operating systems we like (namely Linux), whereas SimpleX supports all 3 desktop platforms.
Marking this thread as rejected. I feel fine reaffirming our previous decision here, because we don’t recommend closed-source software unless all the open-source alternatives are comparatively deficient in some way, and I’m not seeing a reason to use Olvid over SimpleX.
Thank you for sharing again though, I must’ve missed the previous Olvid discussion personally. Let me know if I’m missing anything here!
Edit: Olvid has only published the source code for their Android and iOS apps, not their web client, nor their Windows/macOS desktop apps. Additionally as @dngray pointed out in a reply, they don’t actually do any development work on GitHub, they just push the source code for each release.
This is less preferable for a variety of reasons, including the fact that such development is much harder to keep track of and look through, because you don’t have the benefits of an open-source community nor the ability to break down changes into smaller/easier-to-review commits. As Olvid themselves note:
As of now, the code is not fully documented and contains very few comments. Still, some aspects of it are very advanced and might be hard getting into. We encourage you to read the code, understand it and make your own modifications and additions. But keep in mind that some mechanisms are rather “fragile” and might break easily
.