Ow:(
This may be the saddest thing I read in a long time. I'm a very active person online (more than 10 hours/day) and have many friends in many countries that I communicate with on daily basis. Aside from Email, due to privacy concerns, I avoided any messaging platform (whether on FB, TW, Whatsapp, Viber, Skype, and any other platform) since 2003. I was eagerly waiting for the moment to introduce Hemlis to all my friends who have been complaining about my presence in online messaging platforms for more than a decade!
Some of the issues you raised for the closure are very valid while I believe this project was more than just a secure messaging app. Its about an extremely respectable group of people (with spectacular track record on creating a better, open and free internet for everybody on this planet) start to work another project for the same better internet for all idea.
I'm absolutely sure you all have thought about these points for a long time and all I want to say is even though I'm extremely disappointed, I will be the first one to support you on any other project that you guys are a part of (I really hope there is one soon) and I'm sure you did your best to prevent this from happening.
Good luck to all of you:)
Amir
Why are you not using Signal / Textsecure or any other of these new apps which have privacy in mind. IIRC they even said Hemlis won't be open source according to their FAQ so I don't think these 3 guys would've pulled this off any better than Telegram even with their dubious encryption.
I can use these apps but in order to be able to recommend it to my friends as an app that can replace Whatsapp or Viber, it should have a comparable UI/UX. I too was concerned about their source availability approach. What will you suggest that meets these criteria?
Seems they changed their mind about open source, according to the comments section[1] "We’ll release the usable parts of the code as free software with the most free license we can. It belongs to the community (and the community paid for it)."
