I think Moxie hit the nail on the head especially with the two trends he pointed out. A team of three developers can leverage global low-latency infrastructure if they know how, while WhatsApp's entire engineering team is stuck implementing *unusually* bad crypto.
NK On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 11:29 PM, Moxie Marlinspike <[email protected]>wrote: > > > On 12/22/2012 04:49 AM, Brian Conley wrote: > > That said, thus far, neither redphone nor those over listed rivals skype > > or Google hangouts quality of transmission. > > Depends. RedPhone's audio quality is (in general) substantially better > on Android than Skype's has been. Skype's desktop audio quality is > probably better than RedPhone's, however. > > I see this more as a desktop vs. android thing rather than a skype vs. > redphone thing. Low-latency audio on Android is just hard, particularly > over mobile data networks. It is true, however, that Skype has a much > larger engineering team than we do. > > I like to think that RedPhone is getting better all the time, but if > this is something that you or anyone on this list is interested in, we'd > obviously welcome help improving things in any way that you can > contribute. Please don't be shy about filing issues in the GitHub issue > tracker for the project, even if they are user experience type things > rather than strictly bugs. We need the feedback. > > > This is not meant to detract from them, its more a question, is a > > revenue based model the only option to ensure high enough quality to > > attract users and grow? > > I agree that it's a problem. I've pointed out before that user > expectations for these types of apps are set by things like WhatsApp, > which is an entire company focused *just* on a single chat app, with an > engineering team that is larger than the number of developers in the > whole "privacy enhancing technology" community put together. > > I think there are at least a couple of trends working in our favor though: > > 1) Mobile apps are a huge opportunity for us. It's difficult to do much > in the security/privacy area strictly within the browser, and the > barrier to installing native desktop apps is high enough that you need > something like the network effect of skype to make it happen. The > barrier to having users install mobile apps is much lower, and what we > can do within that framework is much greater. > > 2) Infrastructure continues to get easier to deploy, manage, and scale. > As depressing as it is that there are companies developing insecure > communication tools with engineering teams larger than our entire > community, there are also examples of very small teams that have done > some really highly scalable stuff. The engineering team at Instagram, > for instance, was quite small. They were able to leverage AWS to scale > up without many problems, while focusing most of their effort on user > experience and core features. Right now RedPhone has a global set of > POPs deployed that offer less than 100ms RTT to a relay from almost > anywhere in the world, and we don't have a dedicated infrastructure > team. That would have been really hard to do in the past. > > - moxie > > -- > http://www.thoughtcrime.org > -- > Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech >
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