Jump ship? There is none on the horizon.

Isn't Telegram racing to the top of the charts?

I've personally moved myself and a few friends to telegram. In some ways it's better, in some ways it's worse. It's definitely a competitor

The only occurrences of the the word "Android" are in that paragraph:

>More apps than Android: Apple's App Store has more than 425,000 apps. The Android Market has 200,000. In May, Google (GOOG) announced its 4.5 billionth app download, compared with Apple's 15 billion as of July 7.

Where do you read that iOS users were paying more than Android users in that article?

They have always been hypocritical enough to sell a proprietary product for open source software.

Fishy practices, sounds like Apple. It checks out.

If it's "free" then you're the product (in this case, a promotion for Github).

And I think I have the right to refuse to be sold if there are better alternatives. They'll either have to step up their game (with FOSS) or lose me.

The Republican party is far from broke, so I'd say "many". Example: the Koch brothers. They're not very much upvoted on Reddit or HN though, and generally don't use social networks a lot, so we don't hear about them as much. They don't need popularity anyway: they have money.

Bill Gates is one of the few who really seems to want to give back, so we read about him a lot. It's a better news story than "Shocking! Another Rich Guy Turns Out to be Greedy" or "Wealthy Person Still Not Giving a Lot of Money".

You should build it yourself if you actually care about privacy. This is excellent practice, instead of encouraging you to trust some third-party website like their own.

It is released and 100% open source, unlike Hemlis, which is still under development behind closed doors and will be opened "as much as possible" (which tells us nothing about implementations, code quality, privacy features, openness or license).

Yeah, I can't see any reason to trust Hemlis.

Not being able to verify the source code destroys the purpose of using TextSecure.

They should have solved that issue then, not just consider it.

Who's talking about getting the death rate up? What about lowering the birth rate?

And don't get me started on Bill Gates' bullshit arguments. These are long-term trends, his recent "it's been getting better! (for the last 40 years)" cannot be extrapolated over the next centuries.

Bill Gates' "bullshit" is backed by research which you could rebut if you cared to do so.

The world currently produces enough food for 11 bn people. World population is expected to expand to about 9 bn in the middle of this century. This is using current production techniques.