There's one. It's Signal. I keep telling people to use it and they keep not, because people are less likely to do things if they've been told they should do them.
To add a datapoint I can share mine: it's me who would be in a position to bootstrap the change in my circles, but I wouldn't use or recommend Signal as Whatsapp replacement until the core features are on parity, including history backups, which have always been a lagging userstory for Signal.
I think they have different (and somewhat opposing, even) targets, Signal wants to be extremely privacy protecting, and it's a disservice to their goals to sell them as a replacement for WhatsApp, because they're not.
Signal is so much worse than WhatsApp from a UX perspective. Backup sync forces you to allow background permissions (WhatsApp doesn't), you have to set and get nagged to enter a PIN every few weeks (WhatsApp doesn't), there's no transcription for audio messages (WhatsApp has that for some languages), the desktop app loses its connection if you don't open it ever few weeks (WhatsApp works fine), etc.
You are moving the goal post. But you're right: Signal's E2EE is miles better than telegram's.
I was just trying to point out my experience in getting people to switch, most of the time they have different prioirities.
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"
If normies who don't care for things (which is most people tbh) don't decide to switch, do you, as a techie/early adopter, just turn off whatsapp and disconnect with your normie friends? You are unlikely to be important enough in the friend group to force a switch, not to mention that this needs to happen enmass for a swing in the network effect to happen.
Being implacably stubborn is underrated. People can trivially have two messaging apps on their phone, which means they can all still contact you while using WhatsApp with other people. Then they all slowly end up with Signal on their phone, at which point who needs WhatsApp at all?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Yes, you can have two messaging apps, but people will have a “main app” which is typically the one used by important people in their life (family, partner,…) and/or the one used by most people. Meanwhile, if you all use two apps, everytime you want to check up on a friend you have to check two apps.
Imagine all your friends love pizza, as do you.
Suddenly you decide sushi is better so, naturally, you tell your friends to try out sushi at the next dinner.
Assuming some of your friends are not absolutely against sushi, yes, you’ll have that sushi dinner. But what if they don’t like it that much? They will revert to pizza or accept sushi, occasionally, when they want to see you, while still prefering pizza for all other interactions.
There has to be a perceived advantage for changing habits. If few people see the benefits of Signal or other non-Whatsapp apps, they will not change their minds.
> Meanwhile, if you all use two apps, everytime you want to check up on a friend you have to check two apps.
You just have to check the one they use. Also, both of the apps would support notifications when something has happened in that app.
> But what if they don’t like it that much?
There is no real advantage of WhatsApp over Signal except that some people are already using it, and a significant privacy disadvantage. Once someone already has Signal then the advantage of WhatsApp is gone and only the disadvantage remains.
Signal trades some decreased convenience (for example in terms of backup) for some added security. Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).
If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.
I think it’s safe to say that different people have different priorities which result in different choices.
> Signal trades some decreased convenience (for example in terms of backup)
This can't be a barrier to adoption in practice because most people don't even know that it's a thing in order to consider it as a difference, and anyone who both does and cares about it from the outset would have no trouble setting up automatic backups with Signal, and then appreciate the privacy advantage.
> Whatsapp has more “cosmetic” features (polls,…).
> If you value privacy over convenience and other features Signal is a great choice. If you value convenience and other features over privacy Whatsapp is a great choice.
There is no actual reason to use Whatsapp except for the network effect.
> Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
and only those who actually succeed being unreasonable is remembered. The other unreasonable people simply get forgotten or ignored - the vast majority.
Succeeding a small percentage of the time results in dramatically more success than having no one even try.
Also, you're promoting defeatism. If it's just you and you succeed 1% of the time, it still helps a little. If it's millions of people -- even if that's a small minority of the population -- and they each succeed 1% of the time, that's actually a lot of groups getting converted. And it's more likely to succeed the more people in each group who do it.
So the conclusion should be that everybody should do it, since that improves everybody's odds, rather than that nobody should.
You didnt calculate in the cost of failure. The success of someone being unreasonable might return good results for everyone else (but this is not known ahead of time - otherwise, it would not be considered unreasonable before the success!)
Therefore, you risk the loss resulting from a failure.
It's why you don't just use this argument to gamble or buy lottery tickets.
If it's so easy to replicate, why isn't there any other app that has replicated it?
Signal is the closest but they fall short because they prioritize privacy over features. Which is their choice to make, but it means they have ruled themselves out from going mainstream. If you're not targeting feature parity with WhatsApp then you have zero chance of supplanting it.
Telegram prioritises idk the FSB spying on your chats, that app gives me the creeps.
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?
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.
There are alternatives but waaaay too many already. Some will say Signal, others matrix, xmpp, jami, deltachat, olvid, simplex, briar, tox,...there is a new one every couple of months but none everbody can agree on.
The sad part is we were halfway there with XMPP 2 decades ago when both google and facebook were interoperable with it.
I have lately been telling people whatsapp is from facebook (meta means nothing to them) and now they are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, there isn't really much european/eu (never heard of birdychat though). It does show though it is not hard to get some people to switch; they have groups on whatsapp and use it for nothing else; these are people they chat with often so they only need to switch those and then whatsapp can go.
I find Telegram the best app; its faster and easier than the rest I find. The default no e2e sucks so cannot use it for everything, but having everything immediately ready and working on all devices makes it very nice. When you buy a new one, immediately all is there. Yes, obviously I am aware that can only be because no e2e, but normies and non normies alike seem to really hate the whatsapp, and even more, signal losing all your messages because backup/restore is too annoying. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but if someone manages to make more that experience... I mean turn it around; make e2e the default but allow people to create groups or 1-1 without e2e if they want (knowing then downsides and upsides of that).
I didn't say Signal did not and obviously Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat. So what do you mean?
Edit: I guess you are from Ukraine? That is valid, the CEO is fishy. I did say I would not recommend it, I said it is the only performant and easy to use chat app I know off. That was a user perspective thing and more the hope of people pointing out 'no you fool here is another good one'. Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly. Whatsapp a little better, but Meta. Next.
>Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat
You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.
>I guess you are from Ukraine?
Nope.
>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly
The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.
When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.
There are many unfriendly apps on that light? insta chat, messenger, slack, discord, teams? and all of those are terrible software as well (slow, high mem etc); at least telegram is fast.
anyway, the point was not to use or endorse telegram, or the garbage i mentioned, but strive for e2ee while fast and usable.
I would sign up for anything e2ee but yeah ideally open source and hosting owned by an EU company.
Telegram is fast precisely because it's backdoored by design. Forward secret messaging app with proper key management has to encrypt the message to every peer in the group. Telegram can just use single packet to server that then pushes it to everyone else. This difference will die over time as 5G and 6G take over and phones get faster by generation. Telegram will not get more safe by generation. They're only playing to get as many users to their roach motel to make it as difficult as people for people to leave.
