Comment by palata

I don't think that it can work like that. If you make it fully open, you don't know what can happen. It cannot improve the security, it can only worsen it.

Suddenly you go from people using WhatsApp to people using random apps that you have no idea about, I think it's a step backward.

The "escape hatch", IMO, is an alternative messenger (like Signal). If Meta makes WhatsApp really bad, people can just switch to Signal. It's infinitely easier than moving away from AWS or the Microsoft Suite. The lock-in effect is really just that people can't be arsed to install it.

I think that the mere existence of Signal already forces Meta to keep WhatsApp relatively good. And to be fair, around me people like WhatsApp better because it has features they want and that Signal doesn't have.