Metadata-free chat exists already on the desktop with Ricochet (https://ricochet.im) and it will soon exist on mobile with Briar (https://briarproject.org). Both work through Tor hidden services - Briar also allows to exchange messages over Bluetooth and direct wifi.

It's "Off The Record" in that they claimed not to store history. As I understand this is completely unrelated to the OTR encryption system.

I got rate limited so here's my late reply:

Yes, I labelled that incorrectly and I was not talking about the OTR encryption tech - Google still lied though in terms that they kept a conversation record and replicated it live and time-delayed across channels.

"Off The Record" is a technical term to describe a cryptographic scheme for allowing deniable authentication (meaning that only the two parties involved in a communication can be sure the other sent a message - they cannot prove to anyone else that the other person sent them a particular message). The Signal protocol is based off a similar system (Axolotl) which provides similar guarantees.

It has nothing to do with "off the record" check boxes in some UI.

Is this sarcasm of some kind? Is there some joke in here about Whisper Systems vs. Open Whisper Systems?

This comment seems baseless and unfounded at best. Is there context I am missing?

"Apparently partners with NSA" is very different from "for plausibly-legitimate reasons, runs only a platform that has an increased attack surface".

That's like saying that Ubuntu partners with script kiddies because they're slow about fixing security bugs in LTSes. I understand the point you're trying to make, but no.