He's doing great and useful work, there's no doubt. But requiring a phone number for an internet instant messenger is still a deal breaker even with Chromium as an alternative.
I worry about how influential people like Moxie Marlinspike are seemingly turning the modern 'mobile-first' development paradigm into a 'mobile-only' mindset. I don't believe in secure and private computing when you are making it very hard for people to use your tools on (or via) anything but the two dominant mobile operating systems.
If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion, but now he's seemingly saying "oh, if you really care about privacy you could/should use a fake phone number".
"Yes, phone numbers are public enough that they are shared everywhere, but unique enough to lead to a single person not to speak of that persons movements. And "just use twilio" isn't a motivation for using phone numbers in the first place.
If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion, but now he's seemingly saying "oh, if you really care about privacy you could/should use a fake phone number"."
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Personally, I don't know how "a fake phone number" setup can be implemented, especially in the countries where each phone number is assigned to one ID at the time of purchase, so to me "use a fake phone number" sounds like "let them eat cake."
This has already been discussed at length many times. Perhaps uola hasn't seen this blog post yet:
Why is that? There's nothing about it in their faq.