One really good thing about having lots of apps though is that it makes it harder for the NSA to subvert the apps or developers and develop attacks. If there are so many of them from around the world springing up all the time, that makes it a lot more difficult for any one national agency to control the space and become omniscient, and more difficult for them to develop attacks which will work globally.

If there is one thing I'd take from this NSA/GCHQ debacle it's that encryption is the only way to stop numerous agencies from accessing the content of your communications and storing them indefinitely. They already want to store everything. If you encrypt they'll have to decrypt first before parsing and your messages, and that's impractical for them on a large scale. I'd love to see a replacement for email that used local encryption to send information completely encrypted (including metadata) from point to point, with no keys on the server, or perhaps no server at all.

Encryption is a way to keep things secret for some time, not forever, it won't keep things safe forever even if it is considered perfect at point of use, as usually flaws are found in protocols eventually, and new ones adopted for that reason. Even if there is an established attack on a given chat program, agencies would have to take the time to attack and decrypt communications specifically, rather than just intercepting them at providers or with line taps. It would prevent a great deal of casual snooping and make things considerably more difficult. So the more protocols and apps the better I think.

In addition to this, I don't think there's anything wrong with people developing chat or encryption front-ends as long as they use established encryption programs to do their actual encryption. That should be the message that is given to people, not that they shouldn't bother using encryption in their products at all, because they're idiots and will get it wrong. Many will get it wrong, but some won't. I wouldn't trust this particular program (no source for a start), but other new entrants might be trustworthy. I don't think there are enough apps in this space now, the more the merrier, and if some of them are broken, that doesn't make it any harder to evaluate a good one if you are an expert in the field, and it will still make things more difficult for security agencies.

If you're not an expert, you'll have to rely on the opinions of people you respect about which programs are trustworthy. I'd love to hear Binney speak for example on which encryption methods he would trust nowadays, as he's likely to have very good knowledge of which ones are harder to break. The most I've seen from him is that they are

"on the verge of breaking a key encryption algorithm."

which just underlines that what is considered trustworthy today will not be tomorrow. So I think that security is a graded scale, not binary, and to insist that only experts should ever get involved with encryption just narrows the field to a small number of companies/experts that government agencies hostile to you can easily subvert.

PS Just seen downthread that you're responsible for this app - https://whispersystems.org/ Looks great and I'll be trying it out when it comes to iOS. Thanks for helping people stay secure.