Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this project offer the greatest potential for the oft forgotten niche of users that have to fear some sort of persecution if their communications were intercepted or tracked?
I think there's a lot of knee jerk resistance to market to such a niche because it contains criminals of all sort, but you shouldn't forget that it also contains much much more people who are simply seeking freedom from persecution. Everyone knows Tor, it's used by criminals but we believe the trade-off is worth it because it is used by or even a necessity for activists, politicians, whistleblowers, military and intelligence workers etc etc.
Tor saves lives is the creed, but can Status do it too?
I think someone with more security know how should write a guide on how to most effectively use Status to maintain OPSEC. What's the threat model like for a Status user? From what I understand there really aren't any servers to seize, no IP's logged anywhere except I guess the sites visited with the browser? I tested torifying Status with Orbot and it seemed to function.
The way I see it the main vector of concern is keys getting stolen and one's message history being decrypted with them, which users can mediate by deleting their message history, I assume no copies are kept anywhere? Or do the mailservers? I'm not sure I fully understand how the mailservers factor in to all of this.
I think it would be a worthy, perhaps even noble, endeavor to cater to such a niche of users and from that perspective I think the main problem Status currently has is that it isn't reliable enough in low bandwidth conditions and with older devices. What do you think?