In summary: Secure messaging wasn't pervasive at all, and the existing options were either overly technical, had a bad user experience or never made it out of beta. That's why Manuel wrote the first version of Threema for himself and his friends, and released it for iOS in December 2012. //

On the protocol side: In 2012, TLS was in a bit of a bad state. Mobile operating systems commonly offered no modern ciphersuites at all and were sometimes plagued with bad random number generators. (For example: Android 4.0.4 didn't even support TLS 1.1 yet.)