Is it? If the next Snowden uses WhatsApp on the basis of this recommendation, and it turns out (say) the NSA has backdoored their RNG and is scanning all messages sent over WhatsApp, that person is going to find themselves jailed or maybe executed. You can't say "it's secure except for not being open source"; the stakes are too high for that.

It's just as foolish to blindly trust OSS. There will always be holes - the main point to OSS is not to combat these, as they will exist regardless. Rather, it is so one might know exactly what they're installing/using, without having to trust the corporation behind it.

Sure that's no excuse for potentially bad crypto but it's worth it if this gets proper infosec into the public reach in the end. I'm confident this is a first step to having trustable encryption "in the real world" even if it's another client/company providing it later. Call me an optimist :)

Everything can have bugs. The problem with this software is that it's a centralized single point of failure. Only a proper federated protocol can be resistant to subversion by business, government, or other interests.