“Meanwhile, the project didn’t have funding, we were reluctant to look for funding without having a long-term plan, and so we could only work on Briar in our spare time.”
Briar is the messenger everyone recommends for protests and network shutdowns, and it has been running on spare time. Battery drain and broken background operation on Android went unfixed for years because nobody was paid to fix them. Security patches continue. Feature work stops. The tools people are told to install when the network gets cut are maintained like weekend hobbies, because that is exactly what they are.