Signal isn’t much better in this regard. They certainly don’t work directly in the public repos - they have internal repos that they work from and they push updates from them to the public repos after the fact.
I’m not sure about the current state but when I looked into it a couple years ago, their client side repos were around a year behind. I recall reading some issues stating that the client was so far behind that the server was refusing to communicate with builds of it.
bamboo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Signal’s official policy is that third party clients aren’t permitted, and lacks reproducible builds for their android client. Even if the open source code was up to date, using it without patching it to use a custom server would be a TOS violation.
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 1 year ago
One of the ways Signal doesn’t really feel FOSS that I read about was related to third party clients and the official server. Projects wanted to use forks of their client with the official servers. In one case this was just so they could remove nonfree software. In another they were adding minor features (that Signal would have been free to take back into the main build, since they were under the same license). But Moxie said they couldn’t use their servers, period.