Threema. The Secure Messenger

My wife and I use this exclusively and have peace of mind. She's on iPhone too so it's nice to have all the read receipts and better quality videos that you can't send over text. The one downside that doesn't actually have to do with the app itself, but comes up when using it is that the audio on a phone call starts dropping out when losing service, where a regular phone call would still work just fine. Buy it and force all your family and friends to use it. It's awesome.

Can't recommend this enough. The only thing it's missing is self destructing messages, but that's not really as reliable as you might think. You should always be careful of the things you send no matter what and that you full trust the person on the other end. If you care about your security and still want group texts, then Theema is the absolute best messaging app for you. Not having to tie your phone number or email to your account is a huge plus for me, while for some people it's nice to be able to see all of your pre-existing contacts (which you can still totally do if you want) I prefer not to just have people be able to find me like that. I had some of my friends downloaded it (I even paid for some of them to get it, because it's that good) and walked them through skipping adding their phone number and email, had them add a master password (which you have to enter when you turn your phone on; optional) and PIN. You can set the PIN for individual chats. I have one group with 10 people who exchange books with each other. There are polls, now there's video chat to compliment the phone calls, you can transfer your account between phones, there's a web client, the servers are in Switzerland, end-to-end encryption by default, you can verify and add your contacts phones by scanning their QR code to avoid "man in the middle" attacks, and best of all you can just totally ditch your account; delete everything and start over whenever you want with a new anonymous ID. Seriously, I cannot stress it enough, if you genuinely care about security you need to buy this app and get your contacts to but it. Sure you can get Signal, which is tied to your phone number (not to mention gets part of its funding from the State Department and has a broken desktop app that stores everything in plain texts files) or WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook and probably collects your data to sell you garbage) for free, but your paying for the real thing when you get Threema.

Consistently exceeds expectations! I have used Threema for years and, if they had stayed with the earliest versions of the app, I'd still purchase it! In addition to the encryption and security, they have continually added features that aren't seen elsewhere with the encryption and security Threema provides. If someone with whom I regularly communicate does not already have it, I purchase it for them. For everything Threema provides, especially at the price, it's ludicrous to not have it!