Buyer beware
Nice bit of advertising--the same press release can be seen, rehashed in one form or another, on many other "tech" websites.
I would like to advise those who might be considering to rely on this product for their IM-based communication needs to do a bit of research on the character behind it and his possible motivations.
This is the same gentleman who gave fake WHOIS registration data a few years ago when setting up a supposed "Google anonymiser" site. And complained when he was shut down by the provider. It may be of interest to note that his current domains are registered under the name of a forfeited Maryland LLC, with their location listed as a commercial address in Arrecife (Canary Islands, Spain).
And the same person who, in response to a bug in the very same (supposedly "secure") application that is being advertised here, which was leaking the plaintext of every message via logcat, instead of a mea culpa, decided to call F-Droid "malware" (no, they did not introduce the bug, it was just reported by an F-Droid user).
And the same person who sold the previous version of this software (called "red phone" or some such, IIRC) to Twitter. Needless to say, not my first choice of provider as a privacy-minded consumer.
And the same person who, while pretending to develop open source (yes, the code is in GitHub), actively discourages everyone from packaging and distributing his shite independently. Or using his servers. Yes, he will say it's perfectly fine to go and build your own copy... knowing full well that this sets the bar sky high for the practical totality of Android users.
The same one who binds this supposedly privacy minded application with Google Cloud Services on some rather unconvincing excuse (push notifications), while choosing to ignore the massive attack surface this exposes, up to the ability to take full control of the user's phone--including replacing the target app (as well as any others) with a trojan. Silently.
It would be interesting to know who pays the developer's salaries, or who is exactly the entity doing business as "Open Whispers Systems", that contributors to the software are supposed to assign copyright to, according to the contributor agreement.
Way too many red flags in there to go with the hype.
That media are so keen to recirculate anything that comes into their hands without a modicum of diligence is, shall we say, less than reassuring. Or it is not misinformation unless we blame the Russians?
PS: If you want proper secure IM from a known and honest developer, take a look at Conversations.im (no, I have no connection to the developer and his software does not rock my boat so I don't use it myself).