[tor-project] Future of Tor Messenger

[Arthur D. Edelstein]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 7:47 AM, Georg Koppen <gk at torproject.org> wrote:

[snip]
> 1) It should not be a desktop-only application. [snip] So, let's tear this
desktop/mobile barrier down while thinking about the future.
> 2) It should support onion service-based chat protocols. [snip]

I wholeheartedly agree with these points. I would only add that for
chat apps in general, mobile has perhaps 20x-100x the users that
desktop has.[1] So if one had to initially choose between mobile and
desktop because of limited resources, I would suggest starting with
mobile and expanding to desktop as funding grew. Similar to Signal's
approach.

[1] The biggest desktop chat apps appear to be:
 - Slack, with ~9 million weekly users:
(https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/slack-statistics/)
 - Discord, with ~9 million daily active users and 45 million
registered users:
https://venturebeat.com/2017/05/16/discords-game-voice-communications-app-hits-45-million-users/).

Whereas the most popular mobile chat apps are apparently WhatsApp,
Facebook Messenger, QQ Mobile, and WeChat with close to 1 billion
users each: https://www.statista.com/statistics/258749/most-popular-global-mobile-messenger-apps/