[names_are_hard]

Anecdata: No (+1 for Betteridge)

I tried to get people in my life to switch and failed. One person tried it out and quit in frustration because (a) messages dropped over the weekend (apparently during their downtime, and then (b) when they downloaded the desktop app they couldn't naturally continue the conversation that had started on mobile because the previous messages were not visible and so they could not be "replied to".

The first point isn't really an ease of use issue, but the second is definitely a tradeoff between usability and security.

So my friend left in frustration. Trivial inconveniences that would not deter someone who cares about using Signal can easily dissuade people who were not really motivated to switch in the first place.

And now I have my own frustration: once a user joins Signal once, the app shows them as having Signal even if they deleted the app and haven't used it in forever. So here I am sending messages to people who once tried the app and then quit and instead of those messages getting sent as SMS (which would happen had they never joined) they go nowhere.

Honestly I'm not really the target audience for a security-focused app. I'm interested in privacy and regaining autonomy in my digital life, not being beholden to the whims of a $BigTech ToS that changes every month and is my adversary. So I'm looking at Signal because it seems the best bet, but I'd prefer something that made fewer UX sacrifices for security.