CyanogenMod officially ends WhisperPush support, recommends downloading Signal app instead
The CyanogenMod team has announced via an official blog post that it is ending support for WhisperPush, and that its services will be officially end of life from February 1st. WhisperPush, for those unaware, is an encryption service which keeps messages secure and private.
We’ve ultimately made the decision that we will no longer be supporting WhisperPush functionality directly within CyanogenMod. Further, WhisperPush services will be end-of-lifed beginning Feb 1st 2016. As this is a server side implementation, all branches of CM from CM10.2 and forward will be affected.
There are seemingly several reasons for CyanogenMod’s decision to end integrated WhisperPush support. The team says it saw many ‘hiccups’, and had a number of longstanding registration problems as well as issues in various countries with WhisperPush. Also, with the arrival of Snowden-endorsed Signal — an app which offers practically the same services — the necessity to continue the difficult development and upkeep of WhisperPush was significantly reduced.
We transitioned the work to CM13, instead opting to implement directly within our Messaging application. However, with the rapid adoption of the official Signal application, our implementation into Messaging would have been a seemingly unnecessary fork. Analyzing the costs of SMS verification (many thanks to Twilio for their support on this), usage traffic, server costs and registration numbers, forking would serve no larger long-term user benefit.
If you have a number registered with WhisperPush you should unregister by heading to Settings>Privacy>WhisperPush on your device running any version of CyanogenMod from CM10.2 to CM12.1. Once February 1st rolls around, all numbers will be unregistered by CyanogenMod.
Those who have used, or use the service regularly are urged by the CM team to download the aforementioned Signal app. It comes from Open Whisper Systems (who helped create WhisperPush) and offers encrypted text messages and voice calls. What’s more, it’s cross platform and there’s a desktop beta version.
