Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?
I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded. 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 i…
Tried to get my Whatsapp group to switch to LINE when I visited Japan this summer, because I liked the interface and all the stickers, but unfortunately it didn't stick :(
Aside from Signal and Telegram, is there any worthy alternative?
I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded. 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 i…
I had the same problem with Wire, it prompted me to move to Signal. It has giphy gifs/stickers, emoticons and basic sketching now if those were features you desired.
LINE I've not heard of. Play store says it contains adverts and IAP. Is the 'lite' version good enough (it doesn't mention ads)?
I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded. 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 i…
Tried to get my Whatsapp group to switch to LINE when I visited Japan this summer, because I liked the interface and all the stickers, but unfortunately it didn't stick :(
Oh yes I didn't even mention the stickers! As an adult I thought I'd never use such childish things, but my wife and I abuse them all the time and find them absolutely hilarious. That's probably a big reason I convinced her to switch.
I compared them all at one time. Encrypted by default was a must, the rest were excluded. 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 i…
I had the same problem with Wire, it prompted me to move to Signal. It has giphy gifs/stickers, emoticons and basic sketching now if those were features you desired. LINE I've not heard of. Play store says it contains adverts and IAP. Is the 'lite' version good enough (it doesn't mention ads)?
LINE is a bit weird. It's more than just a messenger, and if you venture into its bigger world you'll see an ad on some pages, but for things within the app. IAP would be premium stickers, games, and making international calls(google LINE OUT, it has decent rates).
I don't recall ever seeing a 3rd party ad. I use LINE strictly as a messenger - if you do this, you will never see an ad. I do get a random message from LINE USA every month or two letting me know of some event, but that's about it and I can live with it.
I am more than happy to pay for a subscription to Whatsapp. I have a scattered family and it's a great way for us to stay in touch. As one of the more technically-minded family members, switching to a different service does not bother me but we've got 3 generations on our Whatsapp family groups and its ease of use and familiarity gives it inertia.
Not bothered by the idea of a relatively affluent westerner (me) paying more than those in less well off parts - already do for a lot of goods and services.
Facebook's data hoover and business model aside, are subscriptions, in themselves, unworkable for 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…
I wish I could upvote your comment more than once. We need to recognize companies like Facebook and Google for what they really are, ad companies. I fear that Microsoft might start taking a similar path with what has happened with Windows 10.
I wonder if the products that Google and Facebook offer would actually be of better quality if they actually charged a certain amount to access their services. They have become so essential that I believe in most markets they could charge $5 to $10 a month and still retain a significant amount of users.
Then again, it gives them an excuse to not have to actually have a decent support staff.
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 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.
Everybody has a certain messaging app on their phone: it's called SMS. Add one more, that's already two.
Network effect. My anecdote - out of, say, 50 people I know, two have Telegram. The rest use a combination of iMessage, Facebook messenger, and WhatsApp. 22yo male.
Telegram here has the reputation of a chat app you might use to hide naughty online liaisons from your wife. Like something indexed to an alternative identity. (So: like what the internet used to be like in olden times. But still.)
Huh. I used it with my wife - she was the only one willing to give it a try.
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?
My friends fall roughly into three groups:
- People who have at least 4+ messenger apps installed (these are the tiniest minority, and we mostly chat on Riot.im)
- FB Messenger users who only have Messenger installed (these are a dwindling minority—I communicate with them through the web interface or SMS)
- Whatsapp users who only have WhatsApp installed (this is basically almost everyone)