Apple hires secure messaging app developer Signal

Apple has hired Frederic Jacobs, a Switzerland-based developer, who joins the company at a time when it is opposing a controversial order to allow the FBI to access the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.

Jacobs had earlier worked to develop secure messaging app Signal - the preferred communications app of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden - announced.

Jacbos is joining the Cupertino-based company this summer to work on its CoreOS security team after a two-and-a-half year stint with Whisper Systems, the company behind Signal, which he left earlier this year.

Signal had been praised by the cybersecurity community for its robustness, and Snowden had claimed to use it daily. It was among a handful of apps to score top marks for security in an EFF survey.

Jonathan Zdziarski, a security researcher had been cited highly in Apple's battle with the FBI, had also praised it for revealing ''virtually nothing'' when used with data excavation tools.

Jacobs' role at Apple was not clear at the moment, but his hiring comes at a time when the firm is under major pressure. Apple scales up security measures within iOS with every major software release, but according to the news, yesterday, that the company was working on removing the current passcode-free recovery option from future iPhones, while it wanted to start encrypting iPhone backups on iCloud.