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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

> Instagram and WhatsApp are running strong with barely no competition

You're not wrong, but I find it a bit frustrating how much resistance I get whenever I try and suggest using Signal instead of Whatsapp. As far as I can tell, it has pretty much all the features of Whatsapp that I use, without all the spying.

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No one wants to install ANOTHER app just to talk to you. Most of us already have at least 3 messaging apps they use on a daily basis and probably a whole lot more they use on a weekly basis.

But why WhatsApp is one of those 3 and Signal is ANOTHER app? Not so long ago WhatsApp was ANOTHER. Now it's not. What changed?

I don't remember WhatsApp ever being ANOTHER. It was the first cross-platform messaging app I ever used.

Wikipedia says it was released in January 2009. Google Talk started in August 2005. For a GTalk user, it was "another".

GroupMe works fine

I think there's a lot of "chat app fatigue." I've personally had 5 or 6 on my phone in the past year and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming into installing even one more of the damned things.

Signal work all right, but it doesn't feel very polished. Notifications are a bit wonky, and the unread message icon never shows up on the home screen icon.

Genuinely curious, how is WhatsApp spying? I thought they were encrypted? Are they not end to end encrypted like Keybase or signal?

They are end to end encrypted. There's apparently a lot of meta data (like the people one communicates with, etc.) that can still be accessed by Facebook.

It also nudges users to enable cloud backups which in practice means that everyone has them enabled (...which in practice means that all your messages are unencrypted in the other person's cloud storage.)

Oh no. I see

I'm having some pretty good success getting people to switch to Signal in my family. Keep up the good fight!

I would suggest LINE instead.

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