Now gents, a number of you in the comments have wondered about what other alternatives are out there. You may have seen that I specifically advise against Signal, and other users have also expressed concerns about a number other applications, amongst which Wire and Telegram.
One that, to my knowledge has not been mentioned yet, but which would appear to meet some common measure of functionality versus convenience expressed here, is XMPP messaging application Conversations (https://conversations.im/).
I am not going to give it my personal recommendation because having tested it, I did not like a number of design decisions the developers have made, and I did not like their overall vision for the app. With that said, it's horses for courses.
On the end to end encryption front (all the rage these days, eh?), it appears that the Conversations devs have taken Signal's protocol and _done it right_. That means, they actually specced it (https://conversations.im/omemo/) and had it audited (https://conversations.im/omemo/audit.pdf), along with a couple important improvements such as eliminating the requirement for a trusted server or Google Play, which greatly reduces the attack surface.
Again, I personally do not like Conversations and I'm not going to use it myself--that's a personal preference thing, but kudos to the devs for doing a professional job, especially while everyone else are busy selling snake oil.
I say, go give Conversations a try, it may be the thing you were looking for.
One that, to my knowledge has not been mentioned yet, but which would appear to meet some common measure of functionality versus convenience expressed here, is XMPP messaging application Conversations (https://conversations.im/).
I am not going to give it my personal recommendation because having tested it, I did not like a number of design decisions the developers have made, and I did not like their overall vision for the app. With that said, it's horses for courses.
On the end to end encryption front (all the rage these days, eh?), it appears that the Conversations devs have taken Signal's protocol and _done it right_. That means, they actually specced it (https://conversations.im/omemo/) and had it audited (https://conversations.im/omemo/audit.pdf), along with a couple important improvements such as eliminating the requirement for a trusted server or Google Play, which greatly reduces the attack surface.
Again, I personally do not like Conversations and I'm not going to use it myself--that's a personal preference thing, but kudos to the devs for doing a professional job, especially while everyone else are busy selling snake oil.
I say, go give Conversations a try, it may be the thing you were looking for.