<i>all of them are likely to be able to compromise a messaging application that boots from a web page</i><p>So this is really the fundamental disagreement. What makes you think that running a WebSigned app in a browser is significantly more exploitable than a native app?<p>The way I see it, the worst thing that can be said about WebSign is that it breaks the chain of trust — i.e. that first download is implicitly trusted without any validation from a root certificate preloaded on the OS, whereas an app installed through a well designed package manager wouldn&#x27;t have that problem. However, downloading a regular old executable through HTTPS is no different, and I don&#x27;t see you calling that out in the same way.<p>Beyond that issue, I would argue that the browser sandbox offers a more sophisticated and well vetted layer of protection than you would see in just about any native app framework, which leaves XSS as the primary risk (and Cyph has never had a known XSS bug anyway).