Marlinspike in the linked comment is clearly also disapproving of the use of Signal's servers, so it's more than branding. Unless he's blessed 'MollyIM' explicitly since, there remains some risk it could be locked out at any time.

Yes, certainly, but Telegram states officially in their FAQ, that Durov’s fortune pays for their servers and now it seems there’re creditors too. Risk are everywhere, but an unofficial opinion doesn’t alters the fact that there’re third party clients that are promoted in the official community forums.

When the foundation co-founder & CEO of the development LLC says something – and the same thing, repeatedly, when the topic comes up – that's not as weak as an 'unofficial opinion'.

Of course, it could be reversed, and if you find any more-recent official welcomes from Signal for third-party clients to use its servers, I'd love references.

No, not just branding. Read the message I linked to.

He explicitly says he doesn't want other clients to use their infra.

There is nothing, technically, that he can do to prevent third party clients. That's the same thing we did in the times of ICQ, AOL and MSN Messenger.

And there is an actual demand for features not provided by the official client, as stated by the amount of PRs contributed by non-Signal developers waiting in their GitHub repo, so people will continue to come with their own changes.

> There is nothing, technically, that he can do to prevent third party clients.

There are plenty of technical ways of detecting and blocking 3rd party clients (using both in-channel and side-channel, uh, signals); the only challenge is that it becomes a never-ending arms-race

and the clients are open source[0], so unless the close source it, the arms race is mostly in commit speed. :)

0: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commits/master

Are there any clients that will run on older versions of Android.