this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Good article - but as it points out I am entirely powerless. I can’t move away from WhatsApp as everyone, absolutely everyone I know (in the UK at least) uses WhatsApp as their primary or only messaging app/service.
I sympathize. This kept me on Facebook far longer than I wanted to be. If I wanted concert dates, event invites from friends, etc, I had to use it. I cut that cord eventually, but I get invited to way less stuff than I used to.
Absolutely agree. WhatsApp is the default in my country and all across Europe. For instance, I was on holiday earlier this month and the hotel I was staying in just contacted me through WhatsApp with check-in info. They hadn't replied to earlier emails but defaulted straight to WhatsApp for communication. It would be a nightmare to move away from it at this point. At least it still doesn't feel like a Meta app.
You can, it'll just be a struggle.
If you stand firm, you can get enough people to recognize that there are viable alternatives, and once you hit a decent number of friends and family, it takes over on its own.
Thing is.. the main alternatives are often missing key features. Signal does not let me backup or export my messages & media, that’s a problem for me personally. Telegram and fb messenger are not e2ee by default, and make being so difficult to use. Whatever Google is currently pushing will be demised next month and replaced with something inexplicably more convoluted. Matrix isn’t straightforward enough for mass adoption.
For its many.. many.. well documented issues WhatsApp provides a very good messaging service that is well polished. For most people that’s what they care about.
We’ll have more success getting people to try new things when they at least have feature parity and ideally offer something new / different to WhatsApp in the UX.
You can definitely backup and restore your messages with Signal. I think the app doesn't allow to export to clear text, but you can use 3rd party tools for extracting the clear text from the backup, such as sigbak.
Plus, the app and protocol are open source, so if a feature has enough demand, someone will eventually implement it.
Ah! I’ll look into that - thank you!
Signal allows you to backup your messages. It's under Settings > Chats > Chats Backup.
Not on iOS it doesn’t. They explicitly opt out of even iTunes backups made locally.
Possible if they respect your opinion, not really if you are a weird guy with a disorder whom they like, but are not going to take as a tech authority or something.
I already had this with recommending Linux (and other Unix-like OSes). All my attempts to even talk about it were taken with zero understanding, but once another person tried Fedora and liked it, this started spreading like a virus.
Asia is like Line, and maybe some other Chinese apps that I will never install.
The interesting part is, email is still working fine as alternative. I didn't install any other message app cause email and whatever next iteration of gchat for me is enough. ( I will probably slowly migrate to proton email and some 3rd party cloud storage hosting instead of just use gmail and google drive for photos.)
But yeah, for the less tech oriented population, overcome the hurdle of use different app is really huge obstacles. (Like my mom still tries to share things with me through Line app, even though I teach her how to use email a couple times. it made search for older shares much easier.)
The EU Digital Market Act is in place and WhatsApp was considered a gatekeeper for messaging so they will probably be forced to open up to other messaging networks, hopefully breaking the network effect
Well, there's a question of how exactly are they going to do this.
XMPP? Everybody who had XMPP has dropped it. It's not at all obsolete, but the fact is that companies don't like it.
Closed federation between friends with some proprietary protocol (possible with XMPP too, though)? Well, so I'll be able to write to WhatsApp users from Facebook Messenger or Viber. Doesn't change much, TBF.
I mean, I can imagine them setting something up for identities and private messages from them going back and forth. But practically important features would likely still be locked.
I'm in the UK, and I use Telegram. It's far superior to WhatsApp, and has somewhat better ethics (for now).
Telegram doesn’t use end to end encryption by default.
I use Signal and Matrix and what have you but in the end if I want to be able to join in with communications with family and friends beyond a few specific people I need to use WhatsApp.