[wpietri]

The comparison doesn't make sense to you, because you value privacy highly. It makes plenty of sense to people who don't.

People do literally compare them when deciding what group messaging app to use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746863

For people like that, end-to-end cryptographic security is at best a nice-to-have. And I'd guess that's circa 90% of people.

Signal's true value comes when lots of people are using it. I never bother with secure email, because almost nobody I know has it set up. But I use Signal for the great bulk of my texting, because most of my friends are on it. If Signal wants that to be more and more true, they have to compete with the other tools people use for group communication.