[hjek]

It does. There is less incentive to work on a Signal client fork if it can't be used to interoperate with the Signal service.

[growse]

That's a bit like saying there's less incentive to work on (for example) Elasticsearch, because you can't deploy your fork on Elastic Co's official managed service. It's nonsense.

[hjek]

There's a difference here between Elasticsearch and Signal, namely that that network effect is a very important factor with messaging apps.