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Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?
Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?
Signal - Featureless
Telegram - Not encrypted by default, and controversial encryption
Wire - Really liked Wire, but it had a bug of not doing push notifications correctly. Many missed messages until opening the app manually and seeing them.
Viber - No real complaint with Viber I guess, I don't quite remember why I didn't like it.
LINE - This is what I settled on. Nice interface, customizable, same encryption as WhatsApp/Signal/etc, voice and video also encrypted E2E, everything worked flawlessly. I wish more Americans used it.
In the end, LINE was the winner. That said, if Wire were to fix the issues I had with them, I would choose it instead. I really like the fact that you can use multiple devices with Wire, which is the only one that let's you do that.
Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?
Honestly speaking, I actually tried to ditch whatsapp but failed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are an outlier in that regard. Almost nobody I know is using any other messaging app instead of WhatsApp, and I just graduated out of University so my social circle consists of a lot of fresh engineering grads. It is hard for me to convince even my batchmates to install signal. I think people don't want to install anything else as none of their contacts are on any other platform.
Where are you from? I think location and Culture makes a huge difference. Whatsapp wasnt even a thing in US before Facebook bought it. France was mainly iMessages ( transition from SMS ) before Facebook acquired WhatsApp. Then there are places like China which no one uses WhatsApp.
Remember when WhatsApp required a subscription? One of the first changes made by Facebook after purchasing WhatsApp was to make it available for free. And now they're complaining they can't milk it enough? Oh dear. I know that a percentage of WhatsApp users would stop using the app if they started requiring a payment again –because apparently paying $1 per year for using an application on your $999 phone is outrageou…
Ads are the only way. Even if you want to pay a subscription instead.
Maybe that's why the WhatsApp founder left.
Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?
I can install (and have installed) as many chatting apps as possible. But what is the point? I mean I will have to use the app everyone else is using (which in my case is Whatsapp). Honestly speaking, I actually tried to ditch whatsapp but failed.
I found it hard to get people to switch to signal because there are no user visible benefits and it's a little less polished. But the first day Whatsapp puts in ads..
What about payments (charging a small fee for transactions) on their platform? The number of people already making business transactions on WhatsApp platform is huge, specially in Brazil [1]. A big bank in Brazil has already tried to grab this market by creating a keyboard with wire transfer integration [2].
This model is very similar to what WeChat has done in China.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/whatsapp-is-the-main-digital-c... [2] https://medium.com/@leandroscosta/bank-ita%C3%BA-launch-a-ke...
Almost everybody I know has at least 2 messaging apps installed on their phone. What's to stop people start migrating to Signal/Telegram/Viber/Keybase/etc.. once WhatsApp starts displaying ads?
Network effects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are an outlier in that regard. Almost nobody I know is using any other messaging app instead of WhatsApp, and I just graduated out of University so my social circle consists of a lot of fresh engineering grads. It is hard for me to convince even my batchmates to install signal. I think people don't want to install anything else as none of their contacts are on any other platform.
Where are you from? I think location and Culture makes a huge difference. Whatsapp wasnt even a thing in US before Facebook bought it. France was mainly iMessages ( transition from SMS ) before Facebook acquired WhatsApp. Then there are places like China which no one uses WhatsApp.