Last summer I blogged about secure messaging and why FSFE cares about it (and why you should, too!). Since then a few things have changed, and I want to give you an update on the situation.
The conclusion of my last article was:
TextSecure and Kontalk are both good apps in our eyes, however, TextSecure has a much larger adoption and its protocol has gone through more reviews. The protool is integrated into CyanogenMod, recommended by leading security experts and the project just recently gained lots of media attention and $400.000 funding. So we believe if we are to have a chance at migrating people away from WhatsApp than TextSecure is the way to go.
We knew that TextSecure depended on Google Play Services last year, but we were hoping that this was a temporary problem, as virtually every other messaging app in existence has a fallback mode for delivery that does not require proprietary (Google) components. Unfortunately we were wrong: nearly a year later the development of a websocket based version of TextSecure has stalled. Lead developers at WhisperSystems have stated repeatedly that it is not important to them, and the many requests, tests and code contributions from external people did not result in the situation now being any better than it was a year ago.