Hello,
I (a member of the team) am a casual lurker of some of these subs, but we are a huge supporter in the freedom of privacy. Whether you are a journalist hiding an important source, an average Joe that wants to stay off the grid, users of these and other subreddits, or whatever your reason... Privacy should be a right and you shouldnt have to fear that what youre sending to other people is being tracked and monitored.
We are looking to give back with what skills we do have. Ever few months you will see a post pop up that asks about the best method of communication via mobile phones. The two apps that always stand out are Signal and Wickr. We have used both (and a few other out on the market), but we personally prefer and trust Wickr, but everyone has their opinion and a right to it. With that said, we think Wickr can definitely stand for some improvements. No app or system is perfect.
Signal is recommended for being open-source, but we personally do not like having to link phone numbers or other personal data to the app. Wickr is great for being more anonymous for setup (and we like the features personally), but many complain about it not being open-source and it having ties with the NSA or whatever.
So here we am... we are looking for a new personal project to work on in our spare time between paying gigs and looking to give back to a community that thrives on privacy. With every passing day, more and more measures are taken to keep a watchful eye on every day citizens and every bit being able to fight back helps. We've decided that myself and a few tech-savvy developer friends will be looking into creating another encrypted messaging app for the market.
All of us support privacy 100% and would like to hear community feedback on the issues these messaging app clients (you're part of that demographic) face on a daily basis. We have downloaded and tested many of the available messaging apps out there and some are quite good and we will definitely have our work cut out for us... but we also think there is room for improvement.
Obviously we have a list of basic features to include (or exclude) with our app, but we want to hear what you, the target market, has for us. If you could build the "perfect" messaging app, what features would you like included or excluded to make your communication life easier, secure, while still trying to stay as feature rich as possible. Obviously there is only so much we can do or include, but we will take all serious suggestions under advisement and look at the feasibility of implementation.
We do have other projects we are working on, but this is kind of an "under the table/radar" app that we want to help develop and get off the group. For those of you that use any sort of secure mobile messaging service, please feel free to chime in... while we are an iOS development team every users opinion counts and if things work out well, we would port to Android as well.
So... suggest away.
Edit1: Just to kick things off on suggestions and get some discussion going (once all the presents have been unwrapped across the world of course)... I personally like Wickr. Open source would be nice just to make sure that what they say they are doing is what they are actually doing. What I would like to see though is a way to have more than one account tied to the same phone so that I can separate out the circles of people that I talk to. While a possible security risk for some, I would like to be able to assign nicknames to contacts so I can keep people straight. Id also like to see some sort of BTC integration for anonymous payments. We have plenty of other items on the list, but we would like to hear what everyone else thinks.
I'm not a security professional, but I just assume that phones are not secure devices...so in my opinion this is a fool's errand.
I mean, of course phones are convenient, but being in jail is not convenient.