I’m just gently teasing you because I was 29 years old when Chrome came out. My parents would never have even thought to ask someone to install something like that when the internet first came out.

“Hey, so now that Chrome has been released, we’re gonna fly up to visit your son and install a packet sniffer on his network!”

Yes, you can use their exact build environment straight from GitHub. You can also use Molly.im which is another app that i think is a fork? Im still investigating it.

That’s kind of a core tenet of libre/open software, innit? Independently verifiable software that you can change at your pleasure.

I was looking at Molly.im and it has its own f-droid repo. There are two options: with and without Google servicios.