I guess the best point about these is that they are actually (or hopefully?) somewhat standardised - XMPP with OTR works perfectly fine on the desktop, albeit only for IM. Inventing a new protocol to provide essentially the same features appears a little unnecessary - at least the IM part could have reused OTR with voice calls using some other encryption (possibly based on the keys negotiated via OTR).

I've tried using Gibberbot with some friends. It is pretty unreliable sometimes. I think it may be an issue with OTR in general.

I feel like IM encryption still isn't a problem that has been fully solved yet on android.

(Haven't checked out ChatSecure, looks good.)

What problems have you had with Gibberbot? It's been rock solid for me with a decent XMPP server, and even works reasonably well when proxied through Tor (Orbot). I've had no issues with OTR either.

Both sides occasionally got scrambled messages. Sometimes messages wouldn't show up at all and had to be resent.

I googled the issues a few times and there seems to be a lot of similar complaints from other users of all OTR apps (like PigdinOTR).

I may have been some mistakenly from another gtalk app running or older android phones.

One big UX issue is making sure both people are using it always.

Ah, there's big issues with OTR with users who are logged in more than one location. OTRv2 didn't work well with that, but I think OTRv3 may have fixes...