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Comment by ivm | Hacker News Reader

Signal's UX is years behind even modern WhatsApp, let alone Telegram, which is closer to a blogging or social platform. We can't expect mass adoption of such a clunky app simply because it's more private – it has never worked that way.

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Maybe I'm old, but there is nothing I use in WhatsApp that does not exist in Signal. What are you missing there?

Various group features like communities and group voice chats, public channels, voice message transcription, only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own, backup is still marked as beta in 2026, no business features while all business here use WhatsApp in one way or another…

I don't use any of the other features (in fact, I actively avoid them and would disable them if they ever came to Signal), but:

> only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031836512-St...

> backup is still marked as beta

Also, local backups haven't been beta for ages. The free cloud backups are the ones that are new.

But we're talking about mass adoption, not Hacker News users' preferences. Signal simply doesn't offer anything attractive to most people.

As someone who spends a dozen hours on WhatsApp and Telegram each week, I don't see any real benefits either.

Signal offers a chat app that works fine and is not owned by Meta. That's enough for a significant amount of people to switch already. I'd love some quality of life updates to some of the niche features, like the desktop app, but the mobile app does everything it needs to do.

Community chats aren't what keep people on WhatsApp, the network effect does.

Yeah, and to overcome the network effect, you need something compelling enough to justify the effort in the first place. I have hundreds of local contacts on WhatsApp, many of whom have joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits (for example, a local firefighter feed is shared through a channel there). But I only have about 20 contacts on Signal, even IT guys aren’t there. It simply doesn’t offer anything appealing to at least 95% of the people around me.

>joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits

Sorry, social media masquerading as a secure messaging app isn't a secure messaging app.

I bet nobody joins Telegram because of its perceived security, it's a content platform.

Yup, yet for some reason we see Telegram always pushed on secure messaging app chats, up until the point when someone points out it's not secure at all like it tries to advertise it self. Then it's always about the fun features it has, even if it's acting against the user's best interest, which is the definition of Trojan horse malware .

Also, there's a LOT of people who have joined Telegram because of its perceived security. The company has been extremely vocal about WhatsApp being horrible despite it having always-on E2EE, when in TG it's practically always off.

> It simply doesn’t offer anything appealing to at least 95% of the people around me.

Why not this: what is _best_ for a person once they fully educate themself?

If it were your friend, what would you recommend, once you understood the differences? I just reassessed and Signal wins.

For most people quality of life stuff will probably rank higher than "not owned by Meta". I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of WhatsApp users don't even know (or care) it's owned by Meta.

I've been beta testing https://www.joinmorse.com lately it's in very early stages, but it's promising (if you don't care about the "social" features).

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