Even if they release their server side source code how can you ensure that the deployed version matches the source ? Eventually there is always a thread of trust.

The point however is that the government of India is forcing private corporations to break privacy related measures to suppress civil liberties.

You could host software yourself and communicate within your circle only. It seems like this may be the future - someone just has to make it easy for people to create groups that will deploy the server and generate the app. But that would be a matter of time when governments will start to regulate hosting providers and e.g. banning hosting of communication servers.

So elected govs should listen to corporations. no thanks. i can over throw my gov but not evil facebook

Sometimes I wonder if "truly secure" messaging platform and "internet" messaging platform are incompatible. Is the reality that any internet based digital messaging platform is insecure in the long term. Eventually, your messages can be retrieved, traced, even tracked real time.

I think if your information needs security, don't put that information on the internet.

The biggest obstacle to secure messaging is making it friendly to users.

All popular end-to-end encrypted messengers manage user's public keys for them. And usually provide the client code too. And may have unencrypted backups. And may have account recovery mechanisms that can be abused.

Each of those makes it easy for the user, but degrades security.