I've seen this position a lot throughout this thread and I have a question: all of these apps (whatsapp, signal, etc.) appear to be "free" - how do you suppose they will make money? In the US, the users of sms/mms/imessage paid in some way for this service and can have some reasonable expectation for delivery and availability.
I believe the Signal Foundation runs on donations. So far this appears to have been sustainable, but of course you could make the argument that we don't know if that will always be the case.
But that's the case for any business, even one for which users directly pay for the service.
