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Comment by xmcp123

12 hours ago

Everybody says this until there’s an alternative.

There have been several alternatives, and people didn’t switch.

13 comments

xmcp123

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zarzavat  11 hours ago

The alternatives suck.

WhatsApp strikes a good balance of usability and security. Telegram is too insecure (no E2E by default). Signal is too secure (no chat exports).

Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp, even without the network effects.

  • bornfreddy  5 hours ago

    Signal allows you to do local chat export for backup, as opposed to WhatsApp (which only allows backup to Google account on android). That's actually my biggest complaint against WhatsApp and Viber: why don't you allow local backup, or backup to something I control?

    • j1elo  3 hours ago

      Correction, in case you're interested: Whatsapp does (and has always done) allow local file backups. I know because they are just there on the storage:

        Android/media/com.whatsapp/WhatsApp/Backups/

      I also know because for many years I was VERY cloud-averse so for several iterations of smartphone purchases I did migrate my chat backups between phones (plain copy-paste of files with a computer) without issues.

  • tonyhart7  11 hours ago

    You literally mention 2 of the biggest whatsapp competitor and you have audacity to says "Nobody has even bothered to make an app that stands toe-to-toe with WhatsApp"

    • expedition32  9 hours ago

      Besides what WhatsApp does on a technical level can be fairly easily replicated.

      Getting the 2 billion users is the hard part. But that is marketing not coding.

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