There are alternatives with comparable or better security, but they tend to have other flaws. Most of the alternatives including Wire and Riot ALSO depend on GC

There are alternatives with comparable or better security, but they tend to have other flaws. Most of the alternatives including Wire and Riot ALSO depend on GCM, otherwise they either lack push or force ridiculously bad battery life. They also have bad UX since they don't ask the user for a battery optimization exception permission, so the user would have to somehow know it's required or they'll break after a while in the background. Conversations / OMEMO is a great Android messaging client, but it's ONLY available for Android and a desktop client (Gajim OMEMO plugin). It can use OTR (which it marks as less secure) but there isn't even a decent iOS OTR client anyway. ChatSecure iOS will probably get OMEMO and push support along with becoming a more decent client but it's going slowly. Until that happens, Conversations is problematic because there isn't a decent way to talk to iOS users.