But honestly, in a non-open ecosystem, can you really trust that the near-exclusive two major players are actually playing by the rules? Apple has been relatively protective of its users on privacy stuff, but I've lost all trust in Google at this point.
Long story short somebody preferred to “ship it” instead of waiting to figure out how to make encryption compatible between iOS and Android. I guess there’s some differences in how the key rings work, but Signal can figure it out and /they’re/ open source so it sucks they ever supported unencrypted messages. They just wanted to say it technically worked for rich text messages and reactions.