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Comment by alerighi | Hacker News Reader

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alerighi

> all my messages is easier than making a context switch per-contact

A user already has:

- WhatsApp

- Telegram

- Facebook Messanger

- Instagram that has direct messages

- the good old email, or better, many of them

- Microsoft Teams for company communications

- Discord for communications with group of friends

- the old SMS (that I didn't even know that in some parts of the world were still used, since I receive them only for 2 factor codes, notifications about my card transactions, and spam)

Adding another app is that a big deal? By the way I don't use Signal, but not for the reason of not having another app on the phone, just because I don't know anyone that has it and actively use it.

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You're right that there are many messengers available and Signal will, at best, be one of many that people juggle based on who they are contacting.

That's why it was a huge advantage that, on Android, Signal could replace a SMS client. You weren't adding _yet another_ messenger to the list, you were replacing the SMS client with one that could send secure messages. That made "switching" to Signal (which, ofc, was not a switch at all for my friends who use SMS) much easier for me. I could continue texting my friends and seamlessly switch to secure messaging if they ever got signal.

Contrast this with my friends who kept their old SMS client who reliably forget to check / use signal and generally tend to go back to texting me in a few weeks. Even if you send 0 signal messages for a long time, by switching you SMS client you are already setup to receive them and will habitually open an app that supports E2E encryption.

For example - Facebook Messenger also supports sending and receiving SMS messages - likely because they've done the research and found it drives adoption.

Does anyone actually have all those? I certainly don't. I have Signal, Element, Telegram and I even think that's excessive. I can at least manage it, most RL contacts I know would not.

Well, not all of them, but usually you expect a young person to have all of them. Except Microsoft Teams, the company may use other media, and Discord.

Hell, even my aunt that doesn't know nothing about technology has WhatsApp and had me install Telegram because the church opened a channel on it!

I have all those apps listed plus Slack, Snapchat and Kik(!) and I use them all at least weekly.

Also use DMs on Twitter relatively frequently.

Most people that I know younger than 30 do. It's slightly biased towards the programming crowd, but not that much.

I actually have more than that, yeah

Yes, adding another app is a big deal. It is cognitive load, which may be negligible for some, but a lot for others.

Personally, I use only two of those apps you listed for messaging, and for all the others, I say, "Sorry, I don't use that one."

If you don't use Signal do you really have any skin in the game anyway? People obviously care that it has SMS capabilities and it is widely used for that, so naturally people will be upset.

This does not represent all users. My family has boomers who literally use just Signal (for 80% SMS) and FB Messenger. For many people, less apps is an important feature.

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