Recently, yes, unless something major changed in the last week and a half.

I take many precautions to ensure I only download official apps, but the issue still occurs, regardless of whether I use a raw connection, a VPN, Orbot... I've also tested it on PC, does the exact same there, so it's not just a phone issue.

I definitely agre with and acknowledge the issues with Session and its DoS attacks. Even with that issue, I still manage to get messages quicker there than on SimpleX.

I am going to very, very firmly disagree with your sentiment on Signal. It's baseless, has no grounding in fact. You might be skeptical of it, and that's fine, but it's outright FUD to say it's a CIA op. Also, if you research the government 'leaks', it's never due to the app itself. With cases such as Tucker Carlson, he didn't have great opsec. In the more recent government 'leaks', that was two-fold: usage of an unofficial, third-party app and someone invited someone else to a group chat they shouldn't have been in.

As I said, in both cases, the 'leaks' were due to personal error, not the software itself. Moreover, the phone number requirement isn't actually as big of a deal as people make it out to be. I understand the arguments for why people don't like it, but Sealed Sender makes it a nonissue in terms of metadata. Unless both parties in a conversation are being very closely scrutinized by the feds, it's virtually impossible to track the metadata of a conversation or to know who is messaging whom. Even with close scrutiny, they'd have to essentially do what they do with Tor: look at both ends of the connection and correlate the traffic flow. That'd be possible for any messaging app, by the way.

I'm not dissing BitChat, just not something I'm interested in and it also doesn't have the privacy protections that Signal, Session and SimpleX have. Decentralization is great (I'm very much in favor of it) but that doesn't automatically make it better for your privacy. Matrix is a prime example of this: decentralized, solid technology, but almost zero metadata protection for private messages and the way that homeservers communicate and archive data is concerning.

Don't worry about me taking your word for it, I'm in cybersecurity as a career (though, admittedly, I'm entry-level at the moment) and have been researching this stuff even before I started moving into that career field. I respect your perspective and the time you put into this, but like I said: there are some areas that I fundamentally disagree with what you said.