Why I won't recommend Signal anymore

Come to the matrix!

https://matrix.org/

It's free -- all FOSS, including the entirety of the server -- and yes, all of it: proof by existence: several of my friends run their own.

It federates. I regularly join channels hosted on several different servers, and exchange messages without issue.

It's on every platform. I use it on the desktop, my android (cyanogen, without gapps, none the less!), and my ipad, every day.

It even has voice and video calling built in, using webRTC. This feature has been a little rough while it was in development, but I used it last week in a 1-on-1 call and had an effortless experience. The audio and video quality was on par with Google Hangouts.

Crypto is hard, but it's coming. The Matrix developers have huge respect for the axolotl ratchet design used in Signal. They've worked on making another implementation (in C, for easier linking in various languages, ostensibly) here: https://matrix.org/git/olm/

The deployment of that code to give full End-to-End encryption is a work in progress, but the beta is roughly functional. It includes everything you'd expect: communication works by default, but in an encrypted room, messages are flagged yellow if you haven't explicitly verified the sender's key. There's a key per device; it doesn't leave the device; and as soon as you verify that device/key, messages from it are green, and you're E2E secure.

Disclaimer: I have no direct association -- I became a Matrix convert after trying to write some XMPP client code about a year ago. I'm just really enthusiastic about recommending it because the tech is solid, the sync is good, it solves a problem, and the team hasn't stopped either: they been firing on all cylinders constantly since I started using Matrix.

I love Signal for their dedication to getting encryption right and the security of their users. But yes, I also share a lot of the concerns listed in this article. Most of all, I honestly believe federation is an imperative. So, while acknowledging Signal's history of outstanding security work... Hey, let's celebrate there's more than one game in town working on alternatives.

It's still just a JAR (no native components), so AFAICT there's no technical reason someone else couldn't do a similar thing with their own servers.

Once Signal and others have really wiped out all the insecure messaging people are doing, then we can start with the identity problem with phone numbers. GCM, Contacts, etc are all related to this "phone number as identity" problem.

RCS is an unfortunate grab in this space, and we need to move fast before RCS is the default, and we're back to insecure messaging.

Email addresses are the best form of "federated identification" but are wildly insecure for communication. Here's to hoping we can get some better ones.