Signal have a few things that make it a hard sell.

It's really hard to clean up media. You have to go into every single chat and from there go about deleting stuff. At least they finally added a "select all" option in there recently.

So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types.

Secondly, no web view. There is the desktop app yes, which is flaky, slow and wants to update every day or two.

I just can't see average people putting up with those inconveniences and that's just a couple of them.

As always network effect will be the problem. I know plenty of people on WhatsApp and almost nobody on Signal

I used to use Signal exclusively rather than Whatsapp, but I've had lots of issues sending media. This has not been a problem with Whatsapp, so I've recently begun to use Whatsapp more. There are also issues with message history that I've encountered on Signal that don't exist on Whatsapp.

If Signal could address these concerns I'd be happy to move away from Whatsapp.

With this news I'll likely need to reassess my use of Whatsapp again.

Where you can't even do message backups properly, and risk of losing messages is a much bigger issue for the average issue than ubiquitous ads becoming slightly more ubiquitous

Discerning people will already seek out other options on their own, the vast majority won't. We know the pattern from the respective Reddit and Twitter enshittification phases.

WhatsApp has long promoted itself as a safe alternative to apps like Telegram and Google’s Android messaging. Users flocked to the app globally, finding it a cheap and secure alternative to texting, particularly people in unstable political climates and authoritarian countries, since its messages cannot be easily intercepted without access to personal devices.