Comment by jeroenhd
11 hours ago
I don't use any of the other features (in fact, I actively avoid them and would disable them if they ever came to Signal), but:
> only three sticker packs and no obvious way to add my own
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031836512-St...
> backup is still marked as beta
Also, local backups haven't been beta for ages. The free cloud backups are the ones that are new.
But we're talking about mass adoption, not Hacker News users' preferences. Signal simply doesn't offer anything attractive to most people.
As someone who spends a dozen hours on WhatsApp and Telegram each week, I don't see any real benefits either.
Signal offers a chat app that works fine and is not owned by Meta. That's enough for a significant amount of people to switch already. I'd love some quality of life updates to some of the niche features, like the desktop app, but the mobile app does everything it needs to do.
Community chats aren't what keep people on WhatsApp, the network effect does.
For most people quality of life stuff will probably rank higher than "not owned by Meta". I wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of WhatsApp users don't even know (or care) it's owned by Meta.
Yeah, and to overcome the network effect, you need something compelling enough to justify the effort in the first place. I have hundreds of local contacts on WhatsApp, many of whom have joined Telegram on their own because of its benefits (for example, a local firefighter feed is shared through a channel there). But I only have about 20 contacts on Signal, even IT guys aren’t there. It simply doesn’t offer anything appealing to at least 95% of the people around me.
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