i do not trust signal and i do not believe that marlinspike and his cohorts do not have the ability to acquire the contents of messages.  it's frustrating to see people recommend it.
I've never used it because it won't even run without some kind of Google infrastructure installed. I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw that error message on my CyanogenMod phone a few years ago after excitedly trying to install it for the first time after jumping through the hoop of tracking down a trustworthy APK (which, at the time, the Signal project did not distribute themselves, don't know if this is still true) to avoid having to install the Google Marketplace. I'd never heard of it having this dependency, and so many seemingly privacy-knowledgeable people seemed to be recommending it that I figured it must be a good thing, but a privacy app that depends upon Google is a bit of an oxymoron for me.
@solderpunk I use noise from time to time but I'm with you.
@hobbsc @solderpunk I use signal without google services, but I've never figured out how to compile it without android studio. Is Noise on the same servers?
I'm afraid I don't know anything about Noise. Actually, after spending 5 minutes on the Open Whisper Systems website, I still don't even know what Noise is.
@solderpunk it's a fork of Signal that doesn't depend on GCM, https://github.com/copperhead/Noise
Ah, much appreciated! @hobbsc why is your use of Noise reluctant?
@solderpunk @amsomniac because it goes through signal (i assume).  i'm more comfortable with noise but the central authority is still marlinspike and company.