> That's what is nice about signals implementation is it stands. Sure they handle SMS, but the real problem here is that Signal is just another walled garden:

> That's what is nice about signals implementation is it stands. Sure they handle SMS, but the real problem here is that Signal is just another walled garden: they have an overtly negative stance towards alternative clients, while also having very bad support for anything besides android/ios: they have a bad desktop client and they don't have a nice library. Altogether this means that Signal is overtly and willingly against things like Pidgin / multi-protocol clients or overlay, which is what the users want (ie not caring about protocols). Signal doesn't want to deal with SMS anymore, which from an engineering and high-stakes security pov is a completely valid decision. Yet if it had clean and open local API or a simple and portable client library, or had a stable server API, then someone else could provide multi-protocol clients, tailored to each platform in a secure and stable way.