If There is a Multi Messengers Comparison V2

Techlore
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A year ago, Techlore did a video comparing 12 messengers, including SMS, Facebook Messenger, Wickr, and others. That video remains a pretty useful guide on the most commonplace messengers.

However, if Techlore is to make a V2, here are some suggestions I have:

  1. Replace SMS with RCS on Google Messages. How does RCS currently fare under Google’s management versus SMS?
  2. It should be mentioned that a project funded/operated by Big Tech is vulnerable to being axed anytime.
  3. Speaking of Big Tech services being vulnerable to being killed off, Amazon announced their personal Wickr service, Wickr Me, will not be properly usable starting in 2023. Only AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise will remain. So, a new comparison should compare both. Bye Wickr Me.
  4. It’s great that E2EE, default E2EE, there should be a 14th column before or after “Metadata collection”: Forward secrecy.
  5. When watching the first comparison, some questions remain, like Telegram VS Threema VS Wickr. There should be a pastebin or PDF or Github post showing the general strengths of each messenger. What do they each get right?
  6. Facebook Messenger is a “just there” messenger similar to SMS. There’s a lot of chatter about SimpleX lately, which merits further looks.

So, in this updated comparison, I suggest these contenders:

RCS, SimpleX, WhatsApp, iMessage, AWS Wickr, Wickr Enterprise, Telegram, XMPP, Session, Threema, Signal, Matrix, and Briar.

And these are criteria and commentary checkpoints: Funding/Company, E2EE Option, Default E2EE, Open Source, Transparency Report, Info to Register, Metadata Collection, Forward Secrecy, Encrypted Cloud Backups, Timestamp/IP Logs, Security Audits, Onion Routing, Destructing Messages, Strengths (not in spreadsheet), General Concerns

In this potential V2 comparison, it compares 14 messengers under 15 checkpoints, compared to 12 messengers under 13 checkpoints in the current one.

1 Like
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I don’t think there is any need. It will be a waste of time and resources. The underlying cryptographic protocols never really changed in a lot of the chat apps you mentioned for ex.- Telegram’s MTProto v2 still is flawed, Signal still requires a phone no(that maybe a good thing or bad), Matrix uses OEMEO/Olm which leaks metadata. Almost all e2ee messengers uses Signal Protocol (except Telegram becasue Durov thinks AES has backdoors put in by NSA). Sadly in Signal Protocol companies can choose between keeping metadata or deleting it, so almost all companies such as Facebook/Google/Ratakuten choose to keep the metadata logs.

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I laughed at the part of Durov thinking AES has backdoors by the NSA. That’s an ironic thing to comment when A) there’s no evidence and rather buckets of evidence against this and B) Telegram for some odd reason has no default E2EE.

And that in the current video, there was a funny part where Henry is in a funny tinfoil hat remarking about the FUD of Signal being an NSA honeypot.

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Im very interested in a v2… Even if its another 6-8 months out. I do not think a 2-year ish refresh is a waste of time when its on the topic of messengers. The phone world is changing fast, and private communication is not the norm for society at large.

Ive been reading a bit about SimpleX it got my attention… I think it would be good to include. So bump to the earlier comment

Jami is another that may be worth reviewing (no phone number required)… And is very smooth to use and hasnt been zonking my battery when left idle.

WireMin has also started popping up in recommendations… Its on my list to try out.

Cheers!

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SMS should still be there as many people use it, especially as, as far as I know, only Google Messages supports RCS; which many people may not want to use

Other than that, these changes would be quite good and a useful tool