Conversation

Brief survey of #encryption chat apps I've looked into:

Signal: gold standard, heavily reviewed, metadata quite private, but requires your phone number.

Wire: equivalent to Signal on messaging, less private around metadata, but can use a username. I prefer Wire.

WhatsApp: equivalent to Signal on messaging, but Facebook has and uses metadata.

Telegram: rolled their own crypto, not at all hard to find trustworthy cryptographers calling their work out. Not sure what their state is in 2018 but 2015 was bad.