[ryanwhitney]

Let's open WhatsApp… It's recommending that I follow channels. Do I want to follow Man City, Real Madrid, or FC Barcelona? I watch zero sports and want nothing to do with any of this. I've used the app a handful of times over the years, yet I have three threads/groups from December that are cryptocurrency, investment, and market insight scams. To me, the interface also looks bad—and it's a Facebook product.

Signal is great for certain times and places, but as a daily app it's still a bit clunky and not widely adopted.

99% of the time, iMessage just does what it says and at a high quality. No bullshit, barely any spam, and OS-level integration with my other devices.

[tendencydriven]

The obsession with iMessage and the "blue bubble" seems to be a US only thing, no? All group chats I've ever been part of, and 99% of all other messaging, in the UK and every European country I've been in happens on WhatsApp.

[15457345234]

It's Apple memetic marketing, it isn't real.

[zer00eyz]

> Signal is great for certain times and places, but as a daily app it's still a bit clunky and not widely adopted.

I loved signal when it was my MMS client. It did what iMessage did, only for android, and it worked in my mixed env (Mac, android).

Now no more mms. I have stories now. I didn't get signal for stories, I didn't want an encrypted social network.

[Krasnol]

MMS were not encrypted and stories have been the most requested feature.

It made totally sense to go this way.

[zer00eyz]

> MMS were not encrypted a

iChat and signal had parity at that intersection. The color of the bubbles means something in ichat, there was a known ui component to convey that message...

Signal went from being mms + encrypted side channel to ... another messaging app adding social media features.

[Krasnol]

No it didn't.

It is and always wanted to be a secure messenger which does not share your data with some big company.

Providing an insecure feature within the app was stupid. People didn't even realize that this was an issue, and those who ran away now never even cared about the core features of Signal. They just wanted to have another SMS client.

https://www.signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/

[wkat4242]

It actually started as an encrypted messenger on top of SMS, TextSecure. From that perspective the inclusion of SMS made a lot of sense.

[TillE]

> It's recommending that I follow channels

That's a slight annoyance but it's extremely new, and doesn't reflect the typical WhatsApp experience over its many years of explosive growth. It's just a simple cross-platform chat app that, as the de facto standard in most of Europe, nobody has trouble using.