"The major transition Signal has undergone is from a three-person small effort to something that is now a serious project with the capacity to do what is required to build software in the world today," Marlinspike says.
Many of those features might sound trivial. They certainly aren't the sort that appealed to Signal's earliest core users. Instead, they're what Acton calls "enrichment features." They're designed to attract normal people who want a messaging app as multifunctional as WhatsApp, iMessage, or Facebook Messenger but still value Signal's widely trusted security and the fact that it collects virtually no user data. "This is not just for hyperparanoid security researchers, but for the masses," says Acton. "This is something for everyone in the world."
Even before those crowdpleaser features, Signal was growing at a rate most startups would envy. When WIRED profiled Marlinspike in 2016, he would confirm only that Signal had at least two million users. Today, he remains tightlipped about Signal's total user base, but it's had more than 10 million downloads on Android alone according to the Google Play Store's count. Acton adds that another 40 percent of the app's users are on iOS.
Its adoption has spread from Black Lives Matters and pro-choice activists in Latin America to politicians and political aides—even noted technically incompetent ones like Rudy Giuliani—to NBA and NFL players. In 2017, it appeared in the hacker show Mr. Robot and political thri ..
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