I’ve been working really hard to research and rank messaging apps by their privacy. The more green boxes the better.

I plan to turn PrivacySpreadsheet.com into a place for privacy data on everything from cars to video games. It’s all open source too on GitHub.

Not trying to advertise, I just put a lot of time into researching all this, and I want to share it since I think others could benefit.

  • BlanK0
    20·
    11 months ago

    Signal really is that better replacement for WhatsApp since the functionality is identical, others would have to force people to get used to the different ui and the options.

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      51·
      11 months ago

      Everyone. Everyone. I mean everyone here misses the biggest plus for WhatsApp compared to pretty much every other messenger. Signal is pretty much the only one as “simple” as it.

      We are all too big of privacy geeks to realize what non-tech-savvy people go through with these.

      • Sign up process is dead simple from your phone. It is literally as simple as putting in your phone and PIN. Once you hit the “choosing server” on people using matrix for the first time, you have already lost them. Completely. The exact same thing happened with mastodon and lemmy. People who had no idea about how federation and decentralization were instantly lost

      • Backups: backing up is a process that the users have to do on a lot of matrix clients, or not available. People want to be able to simply move to a new phone by installing the new app, logging in, and being right back with all of your old messages. Even on signal you still have to restore the automatic backup. If you don’t have that file, you are screwed. I can’t remember if Element will sync your messages automatically to a new device.

      Those 2 things and population are literally the only thing that the average person actually cares about outside of other people being available on the platform.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
      107·
      11 months ago

      Except Signal UI is… Not good. It feels like using a texting app.

      Between the UI and dropping SMS support, I can’t get anyone to use it anymore, and people I had using it have moved on.

      Dropping SMS is really frustrating - it was the big selling point I had.

      • ry_
        51·
        11 months ago

        I’m one of those people who thinks SMS has no place in a private messaging app. Signal is the gold standard, and enabling sms merely legitimised this incredibly non private and antiquated messaging protocol.

        • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
          72·
          11 months ago

          And gave a constant reminder to people that something better was right there.

          And put things in one place.

          You’re letting perfect be the enemy of good. At least with SMS support I could get people to switch to “this new texting app”, and we’d then have a proper Signal encrypted chat. And when they texted someone else, Signal would append the “you could have encryption too” signature, generating a conversation about it.

          The people who moved off of Signal went back to SMS entirely. How is that better?