a Russian messaging app?
And we're supposed to believe its not backdoored by Putin's pets?
Please, pull the other one
Secure messaging app Telegram boasted on Tuesday that it had crossed the 100 million users milestone. Developers said that Telegram was handling 15 billion messages daily from more than 100,000,000 monthly active users. Around 350,000 more users are signing up every day, it claimed. Telegram launched as an iOS app in August …
"(C) You will choose your messaging app based on what your friends and family are already using."
Sadly this is the trump card. I was on a BlackBerry once and used BBM and most of the people I knew did. Then at the finish up I just had the girlfriend on there and that was it. Everyone else went off to Snapchat or WhatsApp - and I didn't follow.
Bollocks to it, bollocks to it all. I just want to text someone or call them, anything else they get an email. If they get nothing from me then they get the hint.
I use Signal: https://whispersystems.org/
It's open source and can send normal SMS as well as secure encrypted ones. So, you can still use it for all your messaging, even if some of your contacts aren't signed up for it.
No affiliation, etc. Just wondered why it never gets a mention, when this kind of app is being discussed.
Signal, and its predecessor, have been mentioned in the past on The Register.
I use Signal as well but it's not perfect: the login is tied to the telephone number so you can use the same account on different devices and device support is limited.
But I think the main reason for its lack of popularity is that it simply (and deliberately) isn't "social" enough. The big feature of all the others is the ability to set up groups. They don't really care about security.
It was over a year ago that WhatsApp announced (to a flurry of publicity) that they were implementing end-to-end encryption, albeit only for Android to Android conversations. They still haven't rolled it out to iOS or other platforms, so their current effort is entirely half arsed.
Telegram's encryption might be homebrewed, but at least it is available across platforms (unlike WhatsApp), and they've spoken loudly of a prize if anyone can break it and that prize remains unclaimed.