I had respect for TextSecure until they actually removed the ability to secure text messages.
Now, rather than "here's a way to secure your existing communication path" it's become a game of "become reliant on having a working data connection, our cloud service and google's push service if you want to communicate".
It's not even as though I can choose to stay on an older version to keep the SMS functionality without forcing all of my friends to never upgrade it either (many of whom already have, if only accidentally).
Colour me exceedingly unimpressed -especially as in the 2 years I've been using TextSecure, I and all the friends I've tried to convert have had nothing but issues with the push. This whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth and has made me rather angry.
I don't share your view. Encrypted SMS functionality was not ready for the masses with the key exchanges, meta data leakage and was source of many bugs. Now users are never confronted with keys and other scary stuff :) Furthermore, most of my friends have switched from WhatsApp, so they did not use the encrypted SMS functionality in the first place.
I'm very impressed with the apps Whisper Systems have delivered. Please support them to accelerate development for even better encrypted communications!
Are the "masses" and existing users (who have learned to use the existing functions) mutually exclusive? Was there a large maintenance burden to support the existing feature?
It was a large maintenance burden: "It’s holding us back. Dealing with all the corner cases associated with the encrypted SMS/MMS transport prevents us from dedicating focus and attention to make the overall product better." https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/
Except that the whole point of me wanting to use TextSecure is the encrypted SMS/MMS transport. How would removing the one feature that actually stands out make for a better product?
Hmm, I've never quite managed to find what all these problematic corner cases actually are.
The bit that jumps out from your link is the fact they now support iOS, and iOS won't let them programatically send/receive SMS. It seems to be a case of "now we support iOS, to keep feature parity, we're stripping out our main feature!" -I insert my own <slowclap /> at this point.
