Agreed, there is no reason to do this. Not necessarily malicious, sometimes people just have bad ideas and/or justify them with bad reasoning.

OP, please release the source code as soon as possible; no one cares if it's ugly or half-broken or whatever.

When the app is released I might test it out briefly, but for something as important as encrypted comms I won't consider using it regularly until source is available (and ideally it has reproducible builds too). 

 We will release code and android apk at the same time.