Eh, whatsapp isn't ideal and its owner is one of the big devils of today, but it's the only way to send and receive instant messages among billions of people. I despise it, but it's the only way I can contact people. Needless to say, they don't give a single flying fuck about privacy.
Whatsapp outages make people migrate to Telegram for 1-2 days at most, nobody ends up staying there. Signal? I've only ever met three other people in RL who have even heard of it, and I work in IT.
A more apt comparison would be to languages. Whatsapp is english: clunky, weird, full of nonsense, but it's what "everyone talks". Signal would probably be lojban or esperanto.
Look, I hate Facebook just as much as the next guy. But I live in The Netherlands and it's the primary way I can contact literally everyone I know. So changing to another messaging app is hard here.
In some countries like India, people just assume that everyone uses whatsapp. It's gotten to the point where whatsapp has become the definition of messaging (for most people).
I don't see how Whatsapp is outdated to the point where one would compare it to IE, but I'll say whatsapp is more like Google Chrome than IE.
Except it does nearly everything any other messaging app does, so there really is no need to force a switch. Unlike Internet Explorer, that used outdated rendering engine making it both slow and buggy, it was unsafe as it used ActiveX, didn't support ad-blockers it actually broke or didn't open most new website.
WhatsApp seems very conservative with adding new features. I generally feel the features they do decide to add are all pretty useful. Telegram on the other hand doesn't ever seem to slow down with the new features. Many of them seem great, but just as many I would never use. I'm still wondering why Telegram won't introduce end-to-end encryption as a default.
I'd say Viber is worse (unbearably slow, has ads), and it's the most used messaging app in Ukraine which just sucks. (basically everyone has it)
people are slowly switching over to Telegram but it still has less then 50% market share...
Matrix or Signal only for me. nobody uses Whatsapp here in the states, sms is simply insecure in every way, and telegram has very suspicious roots imo, along with a lack of e2ee and a terrible ui.
signal is the most secure option and matrix is federated making it the most "open" option.
Except people at one point realized that IE is shit and switched to better alternatives. I don't see this happening with WhatsApp - everyone and their great grandfather uses it and all other messengers are niche occurrences
Technically, unironically, its latest desktop version for Windows is better than expected. It's no longer based on Electron or whatever, consumes less resources than before and works adequately.
I have WhatsApp and Viber. 95% of people use WhatsApp, even though I prefer Viber.
I do not really have anything against it, even if FB owns it.
And I do not have a FB account.
Best messaging app is the one that has most users and is free to use.
Sadly the truth is so simple, that's why everyone in Asia, Europe, Africa and South America use WhatsApp.
I agree 100% with you. Whatscrapp is just a proprietary user subjugating version of XMPP. I prefer to communicate using xmpp protocol because it's federated like fediverse. You can use conversation for android