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Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

It isn't harder to use than Whatsapp. It's actually simpler, because it has less useless bells and whistles.

All you need to do is convince them that it's for their good, if they can agree on that then the technicality isn't difficult.

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There are a few areas which are harder to use like backups.

I suspect one of the most difficult to address is getting it to successfully evade the random vendor-built aggressive battery saving settings in Android. WhatsApp is usually whitelisted from those so "just works". If you don't do similar things for Signal, it will stop picking messages up/notifying you after a day or two of inactivity.

The backup issue makes Signal infeasible for me to suggest to family/friends as a serious alternative. It's just not up for discussion. People care about preserving their chat histories and I'm not about to put myself in a position where I'm at fault when that stuff goes lost because something or other. There's a lot of sentimental value there that is non-negotiable.

Unfortunately, that leaves me with ... nothing to recommend people switch to.

I have the exact same issue with Signal, which is sad, because it's perfect except for the lack automatic and encrypted cloud backup.

On that note, this feature - https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/1567 - to allow bulk saving of media to iOS photos also hasn’t been addressed.

Whatsapp allows media from specific chats to be auto saved to photos. It is a very important feature, not sure how these aren’t making the priority bar.

Did Signal for Android drop Google Play Services? I thought they still supported push notifications through Google on Android unless you opted out or use a phone without Google Play.

It is a bit harder to use but, what's more important, not as feature-rich and doesn't have literal billions of users. We are looking at the issue of getting someone to switch selfishly, convinced it's about them not being able to figure things out. Instead, it might be that they want a more polished app or one that has all of their contacts, not just us.

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