[lxgr]

At a first glance, this looks like a variation of the Signal protocol to me, which seems great as a message-layer solution (i.e. a successor to OTR) – as long as the idea is not to bolt it onto RCS, like OTR was bolted on to various non-interoperable messaging protocols.

I’m quite happy to be mostly independent from telcos and phone numbers for my instant messaging; I really don’t want to go back to the bad old days of messengers supporting only one device per account and my account and address being tightly coupled to a phone plan/number.

“Google builds another messenger” is a joke at this point, but the reality of “Google delegates messaging to telcos” might just be worse.

Yes, iOS/iMessage and Android/RCS don’t interoperate and it’s very annoying, but not even Android (RCS) and Android (SMS, because there’s seemingly still uncountable edge cases disqualifying RCS in many given setups) interoperating is honestly unforgivable.