ringrtc

They want to do this because they want more traction for their blockchain: TRON, which, IIRC, is the payment method for ads, usernames and "stuff" inside Telegram. However Du Rove is right about a bunch of things: - Signal clients suck, specially the Desktop one where they ship (or used to) pre-built binaries like their own lib: https://github.com/signalapp/ringrtc - Also you can't have Signal without Google Play Store - Signal client suck in usability. I wish I had Telegram client (android) and desktop (qt) instead of this electron garbage. Telegram clients are super-duper-awesome - I would say that removing phone number requirement is their #1 request. yet they take so much time to address it, specially when they cry about phone number validation SMS costs - BTW, telegram is implementing a very nice idea of a crowd sourced sms validatio

If you did not know, there is also https://github.com/signalapp/ringrtc by the Signal App team, which is written in Rust

Signal is still an improvement over other non-federated messengers in that it's open-source, so you actually can try to improve the situation, although it's notoriously difficult. As an example of more platform support: https://github.com/signalapp/ringrtc/pull/12 signal-cli is an example of a 3rd party client which is tolerated for now: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli The main problem right now is that they don't have enough developers to take care of everything, but it's not specific to centralized services (no developer == no code). If you care about it, you can develop your own client using their library (à la signal-cli). Regarding your last paragraph: I could probably list 20 features I'd like to see in Signal. That doesn't mean I want somebody implementing them with no guarantee about how securely they are implemented. One of t