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by okatsu 2872 days ago
I was on Wire for a time and even got other people on board. Then the experience suddenly degraded out of nowhere. The desktop and web clients would never finish syncing. Some other stuff I don't remember. I really liked the app though.

I mean the unfortunate reality of chat programs is that there are so many that when I'm having weird problems I'm not gonna spend time opening issues on GitHub and sending logs; I'll just go back to what works. That's even more true for my non-technical friends.
2 comments
Tomte 2872 days ago
This. User experience is everything.

In my case, not Wire, but Signal. My Signal contact list is exactle two people long. Trying to get people to move from WhatsApp elsewhere is hard, especially if some of them even additionally installed Threema a few years back when Facebook bought WhatsApp.

But at least two people. With one of them I was regularly conversing on Signal, so much that she even preferred it to WhatsApp.

One day she messaged me on WhatsApp again. She said Signal had not set notifications for my messages a few times now, and she's fed up.

I never had that problem. Maybe she misunderstood or misconfigured something. But it doesn't matter. Signal is dead to her.

It's really easy to lose perspective as a developer how much this usability stuff matters. Sure, we all pay lip service to it, tell each other how bad the UI on some tool is and fake humility about our missing sense for anything design (including UI design).

But we don't really get it.

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walterbell 2872 days ago
Wire mobile apps have been reliable through several years of daily use. Does not require a phone number and Wire is working on interoperability with other E2E messaging services, via the IETF MLS protocol.
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okatsu 2872 days ago
I'm happy for you. Buf that doesn't undo what happened to us.
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walterbell 2872 days ago
Have you filed a bug report on github?
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okatsu 2872 days ago
I already mentioned in my comment above that when a chat app misbehaves I don't spend time doing that and that my friends are even less likely to. It might seem unfair to you but that's just how it is. If it doesn't work I move on. Best of luck to Wire though.
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