A lot of the high profile stories about people being busted over Tor recently have been related to vulnerabilities in FireFox/Tor Browser Bundle and the FBI run

A lot of the high profile stories about people being busted over Tor recently have been related to vulnerabilities in FireFox/Tor Browser Bundle and the FBI running honeypots that can exploit those vulnerabilities. Ricochet works by essentially starting up a Tor Hidden Service and then listening for messages from other users, so there's no exposure to browser-based attacks. It's end-to-end encrypted and less susceptible to traffic analysis attacks because it never hits an exit node.