8 ms·

Except for social network effects (larger user base), what are WhatsApp's advantages vs Signal?

uppsalax 6y ago
There was the same debate over Whatsapp vs Telegram clash. The fact here is that network effects play a big role in these kind of business models. Moreover think about the fact that whatsapp was one of the first entrants, and was bought by Mark Zuckerberg. Brand is another big player when we consider and analyse that competitive landscape... Security is one of the most important factors nowadays, especially if we consider the data breaches number, that is increasing dramatically (600% since covid-19 outbreak). But are like p2p models, if there aren't many people to create traffic, it isn't worth it (for the moment at least). And in case of messaging apps these people must be your friends! (Word-of-mouth) Do not misunderstand me, I am 100% for security and privacy, but here users are driven by other factors unfortunately.
Closi 6y ago
In the UK I don't know a person without WhatsApp, pretty much everyone uses it. I don't know a single person who has signal. If I say to a friend "I'll message you on WhatsApp" they will be like "ok great". If I say to a friend "I'll message you on Signal" they will be like "What is that? Oh I have to download something? Don't you have WhatsApp? Screw it just send me a text." So you can't really say "Apart from larger user base why do people use it?". It's like saying "Apart from an inability to breathe, why don't people live underwater?"
- tommyage 6y ago
  I just informed all my important contacts about the deletion of my whats app account per this message and told them my substitution. All people who are important to me migrated. Some refused for a long time for no reason, but in the end installed a separate app alongside WA. But I get your position: Judging by the amount of unfair usability and amount of third parties involved in any co.uk-domain, it appears to me that the common folk gives a shit about it over there. However, I wont get any site a visit who does the above. There are alternatives to gain information.
- type0 6y ago
  > It's like saying "Apart from an inability to breathe, why don't people live underwater?" Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat
tinus_hn 6y ago
In most markets, almost everyone has a WhatsApp account. I don’t have a Signal account and nobody ever asked for it.
pixiemagic 6y ago
Well, that is surely by far the main reason anyone uses any messaging app. The majority of people don't care about features or even privacy, and use the app that everyone else is on. In Europe/the UK at least, that seems to be WhatsApp. Outside of techie people, if you ask someone to use something like Signal you'll be met with "why? I already have WhatsApp". "larger user base" is an understatement; the difference is several orders of magnitude. (on a personal level, I don't enjoy using WA, but it's necessary here unless you only communicate within a bubble of tech workers)
outime 6y ago
The thing with WhatsApp is that besides the largest user base (most important reason IMHO) it just works very well. I don’t know about Signal as I’ve briefly used it but why would anyone switch apart from us? You can’t just convince the majority of the users with privacy arguments or even hypothetical extra features from Signal. Only if WhatsApp would introduce something really annoying (huge ads, fees, constant technical issues) people would start to move. But even Telegram which is so much better IMHO (albeit privacy by default isn’t better) will hardly be #1 ever if nothing of the above happens.
- jjbinx007 6y ago
  I believe WhatsApp used to charge a small fee a few years back.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    They charged $1/year “on paper” but never actually collected it. That would have been plenty of revenue for any normal people but they got greedy and realised their user’s private data was worth much much more.
    - meibo 6y ago
      Mind that this was before the Facebook buy-out/the original creators leaving, so I assume strategic masterminds at FB reversed that pretty quickly.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      I'm curious to know if when I make some voice/video calls, and send and receive some data and push notifications, how far that dollar would really go.
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        At scale, that dollar will go very far. Unmetered bandwidth is cheap if you look beyond the cloud providers and the majority of calls can be established directly (in fact WhatsApp does use UPnP to map ports presumably for direct connections) so you'd only ever use that bandwidth for texts/transient media uploads and the small percentage of calls that can't be established directly and need to be proxied through. WhatsApp doesn't store media long-term so storage requirements are also small.
nvr219 6y ago
The biggest reason is larger user base. But here are two things I do in WhatsApp that I can't do in Signal: - Share live location. If I need to meet up with somebody, or let someone know how far away I am and when I'm arriving, I use share live location. "Share for 1 hour." In Signal you can share your location at a moment in time but it doesn't update. - Broadcast messages ("mass text" basically). In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other (to them it looks like I messaged them 1:1). In Signal I would have to use a group and all the members would see each other.
- cja 6y ago
  Almost - they get the little broadcast icon under the message
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other What's the use case for this? "Happy New Year!"?
  - nvr219 6y ago
    Here are a few: 1. I'm on a few "mailing lists" that are delivered via WhatsApp, like "weekly one-minute sermon" type stuff. 2. I have a friends that are all into the same kind of music but don't know each other. I use broadcast to send them links to bandcamp, spotify, etc. 3. I have a broadcast list for my local friends. If I want to get rid of something or looking for something ("hey I'm getting rid of this, do you want it" [photo]) I use that list.
  - lxgr 6y ago
    Yes, or sharing a joke, a recipe, a holiday photo etc. with friends and family that might not know each other. I don't use it often, but it's very convenient.
- octorian 6y ago
  > Share live location This can be an extremely useful feature at times, and is also E2E encrypted with a similar model to group chats (but modified to allow for lossy delivery). > Broadcast messages This is one of those interesting features that many people are completely oblivious to, don't use, and don't understand why anyone needs. Meanwhile, many other people use it constantly and simply can't live without it.
arximboldi 6y ago
As someone that does not have a smartphone, WhatsApp and Signal are really annoying because they are the two apps that can not be used without one (even though they have desktop apps). Telegram and FB Messenger and Hangouts at least can, but here in Europe WhatsApp is the default for everything and there are things for which it is becoming almost completely necessary. But I simply find the whole chat ecosystem so depressing. A few years ago at least I could chat with Google Talk people via Jabber. It is really absurd that instant messaging is not federated like email. Of course there is one explanation: while Email was invented in the 70s at research institutions with goals beyond profit, IM already started in the 90s with companies trying to capitalize their user-base with vendor lock-in... (ICQ, MSN, etc.). Sad, sad, sad.
- Timpy 6y ago
  I'm stepping out of my domain knowledge on this one to start a discussion, I hope to have my points corrected where I'm wrong. Another note, I'm not advocating for FB's methods I'm strictly interested in some cryptography aspects. As I understand it, in order to have real end-to-end encryption (the real stuff, not some marketing term) each device has to generate a long set of keys and with each message sent, they cycle through to the next key. If WhatsApp is doing what it reports it's doing and it actually is end-to-end encrypted then the web application needs to use your phone because it needs that set of keys. I'm not sure if it specifically sends through your phone or if it sends via the webapp, but you have to use the keys in the correct order or the device you're contacting won't be able to decrypt the next message.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    Yes, WhatsApp is doing encryption that is E2E between two devices. That's a good security model. There's no particular reason that that has to be two phones though - could be desktop, wifi tablet etc.. That limitation is a result of a 'product' decision where your identity on WhatsApp is a mobile phone number. That decision was a big part of what allowed WhatsApp to scale quickly (people didn't need to create an account, just install the app and start messaging people whose numbers they had).
fsflover 6y ago
Why would you replace one centralized system for another? Every such system gets in trouble once it's too big (in terms of money and politically). Choose Matrix instead.
corobo 6y ago
You can't exclude the one defining reason haha. That's all there is, other people use it.
nelsonenzo 6y ago
Signal unfortunately has limited media support. Otherwise I would love to have my wife on it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- drcongo 6y ago
  I've found Signal's media support to be decent (although it absolutely mangles video). What are you missing?
  - nelsonenzo 6y ago
    multi-photo attachments and video.
rattray 6y ago
In the past I found signal to be less slick and reliable than whatsapp, but hopefully that's no longer true
simias 6y ago
Signal UI is mediocre. I want it to succeed, but both WhatsApp and Telegram are simply a lot more convenient to use. WA and Telegram have a pure web client when you want to quickly have access to your chats without installing anything. If you decide to install the standalone clients you'll find that Telegram is vastly ahead of Signal. You can change the spellchecking language and add dictionaries, you have a lot more options for formatting messages (code blocks etc...), it deals better with multimedia content like inline audio, it's a lot faster and less resource-hungry. The only reason I still bother with Signal is because I know that, in theory, from a security perspective it's the better of the three. In practice it's by far the worst though.
- drcongo 6y ago
  This post sums up my feelings exactly. Signal is objectively ugly and has quite a lot of display bugs that there's really no excuse for in a messaging app. Telegram is (subjectively) beautiful - they really nailed the UI - and is by far the nicest to use of the three. WhatsApp is both hideous and horrible to use. I wish I could drag people away from it, but even having had my WhatsApp status set to "WhatsApp is spyware, message me on Telegram" for the past 3 years, not a single person has switched.
  - screamingninja 6y ago
    > Signal is objectively ugly That's a weird thing to say. How is anything objectively ugly? It is a matter of opinion after all.
    - drcongo 6y ago
      You're right, I've come back 5 days later to correct myself. I've been using Signal a lot more in the last week and actually nearly all the things that I would say justified the use of the word "objectively" are now fixed. They were all bugs, rather than design choices - things like inconsistent padding, and a tiny unpadded input window when typing long messages. It's actually pretty nice now.
Atariman 6y ago
I would recommend Threema. It's been recently open-sourced and has the most secure encryption mechanism. https://threema.ch/en/open-source https://threema.ch/en/open-source
- drcongo 6y ago
  I had Threema installed but not set up so your comment prompted me to set it up and I don't think they could have come up with a more confusing setup if they'd tried. First screen asked me to wiggle my finger on the screen without offering any explanation. Second screen gave me a random string and told me that's my ID. Third screen asked me to add a password for Threema Safe, whatever that is. I then couldn't leave that screen at all because the on-screen keyboard covered over the next button, and the one big green button that was visible did nothing. Eventually I accidentally swiped and got to another screen that asked me what Threema Safe I wanted to use, like I have any idea what a Threema Safe is. After that it asked me to put in a username, even though I already have a Threema ID from several screens ago. Then it asked for my phone number. So now it has a Threema ID, a phone number and a username and I have to guess which of those is useful. Then it asked me to sync my contacts, I didn't do that. Finally, I got to a screen with a QR code, my nickname, my Threema ID, something asking me to Enter Code for Linked Number, and a Key Fingerprint. This thing bears only a passing resemblance to a messaging app. Most of that setup I kind of understand, but then I'm the sort of person who reads HN. There is not a hope in hell of getting even 1% of the people I know to even make it through the setup process though. Once inside, I apparently have one contact called ECHOECHO who, when I message them, repeat the message back to me. The messaging UI is slightly nicer than Signal and WhatsApp's though, but not as nice as Telegram's.
  - Atariman 6y ago
    You're right, the UI maybe could have been a bit more intuitive. However, the setup is far from rocket science and could easily be improved by the developers. And yeah, it may only have 1% of users but thats's only because 95% have WA... It's a choice about freedom and you have to start somewhere. I converted more than 50% of my contacts to Threema - the rest has expensive phones but obviously no money to protect their privacy.
LUmBULtERA 6y ago
I was able to get most of my family and friends I regularly message onto Signal. It has worked great for us. But then -- my circles are small and few, so it wasn't too hard. I saw no advantage of WhatsApp after getting them to install Signal.
dearjames 6y ago
Well, in Zimbabwe because of the large user base WhatsApp got when it initially arrived (due to reduced charges, SMSs where about 15cents a pop then) around 2011-2012, the ISPs have effectively made it the only way to communicate economically by providing a "bundle". Basically they offer you a drastically reduced price to only access WhatsApp, mostly text message without media at that. Compared to the data plan that can access the whole internet it is very very cheap to use just WhatsApp. The cheapest WhatsApp bundle on the most popular network (Econet) is currently at around 51cents to text the whole week (65MB of data) vs the $13 for 8gigs. Granted the 8gigs is for a month but $13 is a big amount in this part of the world, and with regular data there's the aspect of discipline to not use all that data on youtube and other data hungry apps/websites.
- tilolebo 6y ago
  How does this technically work? Does Econet use a dns-based filter?
boltzmann_ 6y ago
> except for social network effects In the social networks app world this is all that matters

There was the same debate over Whatsapp vs Telegram clash. The fact here is that network effects play a big role in these kind of business models. Moreover think about the fact that whatsapp was one of the first entrants, and was bought by Mark Zuckerberg. Brand is another big player when we consider and analyse that competitive landscape... Security is one of the most important factors nowadays, especially if we consider the data breaches number, that is increasing dramatically (600% since covid-19 outbreak). But are like p2p models, if there aren't many people to create traffic, it isn't worth it (for the moment at least). And in case of messaging apps these people must be your friends! (Word-of-mouth) Do not misunderstand me, I am 100% for security and privacy, but here users are driven by other factors unfortunately.

Closi 6y ago

In the UK I don't know a person without WhatsApp, pretty much everyone uses it. I don't know a single person who has signal. If I say to a friend "I'll message you on WhatsApp" they will be like "ok great". If I say to a friend "I'll message you on Signal" they will be like "What is that? Oh I have to download something? Don't you have WhatsApp? Screw it just send me a text." So you can't really say "Apart from larger user base why do people use it?". It's like saying "Apart from an inability to breathe, why don't people live underwater?"

tommyage 6y ago
I just informed all my important contacts about the deletion of my whats app account per this message and told them my substitution. All people who are important to me migrated. Some refused for a long time for no reason, but in the end installed a separate app alongside WA. But I get your position: Judging by the amount of unfair usability and amount of third parties involved in any co.uk-domain, it appears to me that the common folk gives a shit about it over there. However, I wont get any site a visit who does the above. There are alternatives to gain information.
type0 6y ago
> It's like saying "Apart from an inability to breathe, why don't people live underwater?" Because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_habitat

tinus_hn 6y ago

In most markets, almost everyone has a WhatsApp account. I don’t have a Signal account and nobody ever asked for it.

pixiemagic 6y ago

Well, that is surely by far the main reason anyone uses any messaging app. The majority of people don't care about features or even privacy, and use the app that everyone else is on. In Europe/the UK at least, that seems to be WhatsApp. Outside of techie people, if you ask someone to use something like Signal you'll be met with "why? I already have WhatsApp". "larger user base" is an understatement; the difference is several orders of magnitude. (on a personal level, I don't enjoy using WA, but it's necessary here unless you only communicate within a bubble of tech workers)

outime 6y ago

The thing with WhatsApp is that besides the largest user base (most important reason IMHO) it just works very well. I don’t know about Signal as I’ve briefly used it but why would anyone switch apart from us? You can’t just convince the majority of the users with privacy arguments or even hypothetical extra features from Signal. Only if WhatsApp would introduce something really annoying (huge ads, fees, constant technical issues) people would start to move. But even Telegram which is so much better IMHO (albeit privacy by default isn’t better) will hardly be #1 ever if nothing of the above happens.

jjbinx007 6y ago
I believe WhatsApp used to charge a small fee a few years back.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  They charged $1/year “on paper” but never actually collected it. That would have been plenty of revenue for any normal people but they got greedy and realised their user’s private data was worth much much more.
  - meibo 6y ago
    Mind that this was before the Facebook buy-out/the original creators leaving, so I assume strategic masterminds at FB reversed that pretty quickly.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    I'm curious to know if when I make some voice/video calls, and send and receive some data and push notifications, how far that dollar would really go.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      At scale, that dollar will go very far. Unmetered bandwidth is cheap if you look beyond the cloud providers and the majority of calls can be established directly (in fact WhatsApp does use UPnP to map ports presumably for direct connections) so you'd only ever use that bandwidth for texts/transient media uploads and the small percentage of calls that can't be established directly and need to be proxied through. WhatsApp doesn't store media long-term so storage requirements are also small.

nvr219 6y ago

The biggest reason is larger user base. But here are two things I do in WhatsApp that I can't do in Signal: - Share live location. If I need to meet up with somebody, or let someone know how far away I am and when I'm arriving, I use share live location. "Share for 1 hour." In Signal you can share your location at a moment in time but it doesn't update. - Broadcast messages ("mass text" basically). In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other (to them it looks like I messaged them 1:1). In Signal I would have to use a group and all the members would see each other.

cja 6y ago
Almost - they get the little broadcast icon under the message
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> In WhatsApp I can send a message to a list of people without the people on the list seeing each other What's the use case for this? "Happy New Year!"?
- nvr219 6y ago
  Here are a few: 1. I'm on a few "mailing lists" that are delivered via WhatsApp, like "weekly one-minute sermon" type stuff. 2. I have a friends that are all into the same kind of music but don't know each other. I use broadcast to send them links to bandcamp, spotify, etc. 3. I have a broadcast list for my local friends. If I want to get rid of something or looking for something ("hey I'm getting rid of this, do you want it" [photo]) I use that list.
- lxgr 6y ago
  Yes, or sharing a joke, a recipe, a holiday photo etc. with friends and family that might not know each other. I don't use it often, but it's very convenient.
octorian 6y ago
> Share live location This can be an extremely useful feature at times, and is also E2E encrypted with a similar model to group chats (but modified to allow for lossy delivery). > Broadcast messages This is one of those interesting features that many people are completely oblivious to, don't use, and don't understand why anyone needs. Meanwhile, many other people use it constantly and simply can't live without it.

arximboldi 6y ago

As someone that does not have a smartphone, WhatsApp and Signal are really annoying because they are the two apps that can not be used without one (even though they have desktop apps). Telegram and FB Messenger and Hangouts at least can, but here in Europe WhatsApp is the default for everything and there are things for which it is becoming almost completely necessary. But I simply find the whole chat ecosystem so depressing. A few years ago at least I could chat with Google Talk people via Jabber. It is really absurd that instant messaging is not federated like email. Of course there is one explanation: while Email was invented in the 70s at research institutions with goals beyond profit, IM already started in the 90s with companies trying to capitalize their user-base with vendor lock-in... (ICQ, MSN, etc.). Sad, sad, sad.

Timpy 6y ago
I'm stepping out of my domain knowledge on this one to start a discussion, I hope to have my points corrected where I'm wrong. Another note, I'm not advocating for FB's methods I'm strictly interested in some cryptography aspects. As I understand it, in order to have real end-to-end encryption (the real stuff, not some marketing term) each device has to generate a long set of keys and with each message sent, they cycle through to the next key. If WhatsApp is doing what it reports it's doing and it actually is end-to-end encrypted then the web application needs to use your phone because it needs that set of keys. I'm not sure if it specifically sends through your phone or if it sends via the webapp, but you have to use the keys in the correct order or the device you're contacting won't be able to decrypt the next message.
- rkangel 6y ago
  Yes, WhatsApp is doing encryption that is E2E between two devices. That's a good security model. There's no particular reason that that has to be two phones though - could be desktop, wifi tablet etc.. That limitation is a result of a 'product' decision where your identity on WhatsApp is a mobile phone number. That decision was a big part of what allowed WhatsApp to scale quickly (people didn't need to create an account, just install the app and start messaging people whose numbers they had).

fsflover 6y ago

Why would you replace one centralized system for another? Every such system gets in trouble once it's too big (in terms of money and politically). Choose Matrix instead.

corobo 6y ago

You can't exclude the one defining reason haha. That's all there is, other people use it.

nelsonenzo 6y ago

Signal unfortunately has limited media support. Otherwise I would love to have my wife on it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
drcongo 6y ago
I've found Signal's media support to be decent (although it absolutely mangles video). What are you missing?
- nelsonenzo 6y ago
  multi-photo attachments and video.

rattray 6y ago

In the past I found signal to be less slick and reliable than whatsapp, but hopefully that's no longer true

simias 6y ago

Signal UI is mediocre. I want it to succeed, but both WhatsApp and Telegram are simply a lot more convenient to use. WA and Telegram have a pure web client when you want to quickly have access to your chats without installing anything. If you decide to install the standalone clients you'll find that Telegram is vastly ahead of Signal. You can change the spellchecking language and add dictionaries, you have a lot more options for formatting messages (code blocks etc...), it deals better with multimedia content like inline audio, it's a lot faster and less resource-hungry. The only reason I still bother with Signal is because I know that, in theory, from a security perspective it's the better of the three. In practice it's by far the worst though.

drcongo 6y ago
This post sums up my feelings exactly. Signal is objectively ugly and has quite a lot of display bugs that there's really no excuse for in a messaging app. Telegram is (subjectively) beautiful - they really nailed the UI - and is by far the nicest to use of the three. WhatsApp is both hideous and horrible to use. I wish I could drag people away from it, but even having had my WhatsApp status set to "WhatsApp is spyware, message me on Telegram" for the past 3 years, not a single person has switched.
- screamingninja 6y ago
  > Signal is objectively ugly That's a weird thing to say. How is anything objectively ugly? It is a matter of opinion after all.
  - drcongo 6y ago
    You're right, I've come back 5 days later to correct myself. I've been using Signal a lot more in the last week and actually nearly all the things that I would say justified the use of the word "objectively" are now fixed. They were all bugs, rather than design choices - things like inconsistent padding, and a tiny unpadded input window when typing long messages. It's actually pretty nice now.

Atariman 6y ago

I would recommend Threema. It's been recently open-sourced and has the most secure encryption mechanism. https://threema.ch/en/open-source https://threema.ch/en/open-source

drcongo 6y ago
I had Threema installed but not set up so your comment prompted me to set it up and I don't think they could have come up with a more confusing setup if they'd tried. First screen asked me to wiggle my finger on the screen without offering any explanation. Second screen gave me a random string and told me that's my ID. Third screen asked me to add a password for Threema Safe, whatever that is. I then couldn't leave that screen at all because the on-screen keyboard covered over the next button, and the one big green button that was visible did nothing. Eventually I accidentally swiped and got to another screen that asked me what Threema Safe I wanted to use, like I have any idea what a Threema Safe is. After that it asked me to put in a username, even though I already have a Threema ID from several screens ago. Then it asked for my phone number. So now it has a Threema ID, a phone number and a username and I have to guess which of those is useful. Then it asked me to sync my contacts, I didn't do that. Finally, I got to a screen with a QR code, my nickname, my Threema ID, something asking me to Enter Code for Linked Number, and a Key Fingerprint. This thing bears only a passing resemblance to a messaging app. Most of that setup I kind of understand, but then I'm the sort of person who reads HN. There is not a hope in hell of getting even 1% of the people I know to even make it through the setup process though. Once inside, I apparently have one contact called ECHOECHO who, when I message them, repeat the message back to me. The messaging UI is slightly nicer than Signal and WhatsApp's though, but not as nice as Telegram's.
- Atariman 6y ago
  You're right, the UI maybe could have been a bit more intuitive. However, the setup is far from rocket science and could easily be improved by the developers. And yeah, it may only have 1% of users but thats's only because 95% have WA... It's a choice about freedom and you have to start somewhere. I converted more than 50% of my contacts to Threema - the rest has expensive phones but obviously no money to protect their privacy.

LUmBULtERA 6y ago

I was able to get most of my family and friends I regularly message onto Signal. It has worked great for us. But then -- my circles are small and few, so it wasn't too hard. I saw no advantage of WhatsApp after getting them to install Signal.

dearjames 6y ago

Well, in Zimbabwe because of the large user base WhatsApp got when it initially arrived (due to reduced charges, SMSs where about 15cents a pop then) around 2011-2012, the ISPs have effectively made it the only way to communicate economically by providing a "bundle". Basically they offer you a drastically reduced price to only access WhatsApp, mostly text message without media at that. Compared to the data plan that can access the whole internet it is very very cheap to use just WhatsApp. The cheapest WhatsApp bundle on the most popular network (Econet) is currently at around 51cents to text the whole week (65MB of data) vs the $13 for 8gigs. Granted the 8gigs is for a month but $13 is a big amount in this part of the world, and with regular data there's the aspect of discipline to not use all that data on youtube and other data hungry apps/websites.

tilolebo 6y ago
How does this technically work? Does Econet use a dns-based filter?

boltzmann_ 6y ago

> except for social network effects In the social networks app world this is all that matters