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Comment by Darmody | Hacker News Reader

The real problem is almost nobody cares and those who care, might end up giving up.

A messaging app is not like a personal app that you use on your own. Its value is not only in the software itself but also in the number of users. It took Telegram years to get 500 million users. Now people are being told, "switch to this other app, it's better", "look how many alternatives". How long would it take Signal to be an alternative to Telegram user-wise? And once they get there, some problem will pop up and then what? Do we migrate to a new app and wait 10 years to have almost all our friends there?

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It's pretty straight forward to have both Whatsapp and [alternative messaging app] installed on your phone. You still have an SMS app on your phone, which was the primary messaging application prior to Whatsapp. A lot of people migrated to Whatsapp because it was more secure and private than SMS. Now that advantage is being questioned, I think it's logical to see a migration to something more secure or private.

Most people migrated to WhatsApp because it was free, not because it was more secure and private, for a long time it wasn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_and_criticism_of_Wha...

"A lot of people" is a bit different to "most people". SMS is free in the same sense that Whatsapp is free and you need a phone contract to use either when you're not in a wifi network. In fact there was a period where adding 3G to your phone contract was noticeably more expensive.

Regardless, my point is that there is a logical path that some people will take to move to more private options. I'm doing exactly what I described in my comment, a bunch of my friends are doing it and I don't think we're that exceptional.

I remember people installing WhatsApp because it was the easiest inter device chat other than sms. It was BBM for the masses.

I don't think many people migrated to Whatsapp because it's more secure and private than SMS. I think people migrated because it was free and it had better functionality than SMS. If they did migrate because of privacy and sercurity, how come they don't migrate to apps with better privacy right now?

> how come they don't migrate to apps with better privacy right now?

They are. https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592

People migrated to whatsapp because you could talk for free over your internet connection at home. At least in poorer countries.

With that approach, people will end up with 5 messaging apps installed because the friend circles don't perfectly overlap with their app selection.

Isn't this already normal?

How is the inherently bad? With most people having phones as powerful as computers, there aren't any technical limitations to this.

My phone may be able to handle running a thousand messaging apps at once, but my brain can handle at most one or two before it melts from the sheer ridiculousness of having to deal with the different user interfaces, privacy policies, compatibility issues, etc. of a zillion companies just for something so bizarrely simple as sending a message to a friend.

Yeh I think having 5 messaging apps on your phone is fairly normal already.

Everyone used to have only 1 email address. Nowadays, most people have multiple email addresses for different use cases (work, spam, personal). I think this will be the norm for messaging apps as well.

If you have only five you are already lucky.

The solution is to use interoperable messengers, like Element which works with all other matrix servers and clients.

People care so little that I've had to disable the "X is now on Signal" notifications because dozens of people I used to know (school, uni, hobbies) who aren't on the tech spectrum have been installing it.

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