I get what you mean and it's a fair point. But I would still go with Meta as the most immediate threat in a war with the US.

As the ignorant I am, my understanding is that the phone manufacturer has a level of control on the way Android works and so it wouldn't be as easy for Google to access any individual Samsung or Xiaomi phone as it is for Meta with WhatsApp, an app they fully control with permissions to use (way too many) phone features regardless of brand.

Plus, getting both Google and Apple to cooperate and coordinate sounds harder to me than just going to one company, that is basically controlled by only one person.

They are probably using Xiaomi which is based in China, using AOSP with whatever mods they throw on it, which isn't based anywhere and is open source, or it could be Huawei too.

Huh? I was curious about this and looked up the wikis only. However, WhatsApp initial release was 16 years ago and Signal initial release was 10 years ago. It also appears in the history that WhatsApp had a version on iOS in 2009 while Signal didn’t have anything for Android until 2010 (under Whisper I believe).

I’m trying to figure out how either is a clone of the other when they were developed around the same times. It seems the idea was just a similar idea from two different entities.