To say "OWS shut down this fork" is a rather drastic distortion of the truth. The project was simply not entitled to running on OWS servers, or of re-using the

To say "OWS shut down this fork" is a rather drastic distortion of the truth. The project was simply not entitled to running on OWS servers, or of re-using the Signal trademark, both of which are perfectly understandable. And if you look at the repo that you linked, this is called out right at the top of the README: In the same thread, Marlinspike said that he would be willing to consider "a clean, well written, and well tested" pull request that would add WebSocket support to the Android version of Signal. This would effectively eliminate Signal's dependency on GCM and thus allow the official Signal app to function on custom Android ROMs that do not include Google Play Services. There is now a bounty on making this pull request, and the person/team making the pull request would also receive whatever the BitHub payout would be at the time. ... To be clear, Signal relying on GCM is only an issue for people who use a custom Android ROM without Google Play Services. For the vast majority of people who do have Google Play on their phone, this issue is completely irrelevant. Signal is designed so that GCM is only used for a wakeup event and never sees any of the encrypted Signal messages.