There's a lot about Signal in particular that they get right. AFAIK:<p>(1) All Signal messaging is E2EE; (2) they don't store messages on their servers; (3) the client code is open source, and it seems like a good portion of the server code is open source.<p>Where I think Signal could go further on being the most secure, useful, and privacy-conscious messaging app/company in the world:<p>1. Open source ALL of the server code. They have something called Signal-Server (<a href="https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server</a>) on their Github, but it's unclear if this is the server they use, or simply a server one could theoretically use to run a private Signal server.<p>2. Open source all server-side services/infrastructure code that doesn't compromise security in some way.<p>3. Better features. Signal is currently the most secure and privacy-conscious of the messaging apps, but solidly the worst overall user experience. It's not that it's bad, it's just that the other apps are much better. People like gifs and giphy and emojis and a fast-feeling interface. This is important, because it's hard to be a privacy-conscious individual when all your friends want to text on other apps. At least in my social circle, Signal is still the thing that people jump over to when they want be extra super sure they're not leaving a paper trail, but not the default messaging app they use.<p>4. Introduce a user-supported business model. This probably makes a lot of people uneasy, and while I appreciate the current grant and donation-based business model (the Wikipedia model), that model comes at great cost of efficiency. By operating effectively as a non-profit, you are inherently in a less competitive position relative to your competitors (the best product and engineering people are more likely to go competitors who can pay more), and you're persistently in fund-raising mode (again, see: Wikipedia). There are lots of ways to skin this cat, maybe the easiest is to ask power users to pay like $5/mo. Or just give people the option to pay with absolutely zero obligation. Some non-zero cohort would inevitably take them up on this.<p>Most of these suggestions, of course, especially 1-3, are very very hard and come at an enormous cost. Building in public as an open source business seems to massively slows things down and introducing a huge amount of community management overhead. That said I'm sure there are ways to manage/mitigate those costs.