On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
The “XMPP internet standard” has not approved end-to-end encryption. Their OMEMO standard has been languishing for the past 8 years as not even a draft.
Signal has something going that XMPP does not: it’s a finished product. XMPP hasn’t even started thinking about Sealed Sender messages yet.