I’ve been paying attention to the recent WhatsApp fiasco and noticed a disappointing pattern from potential users learning about alternative services.

WhatsApp recently updated their terms of service which sparked a vigorous discussion online about data collection and services being bought up by other companies. Whether or not the change is meaningful (given that they were already deeply embedded with Facebook) is up for debate, but it did trigger a lot of questions online about alternatives and what options users had to fight back against data collection in their everyday lives.

As a result, Signal and others received a surge of attention as privacy-focused alternatives to WhatsApp. As a big fan of Signal, this was great news! People were realizing that alternatives exist and that you didn’t need to give up your personal data for a messaging service. However the responses I read online when Signal was offered as an alternative were a bit discouraging. In general, I found that it boiled down to: this app is boring and feature-poor in comparison to WhatsApp, Snapchat, Messenger, etc.

It’s hard to argue the point: Signal lacks the ecosystem of content creators and integrations into other software that have become central to the big alternative. Signal also presents challenges when migrating phones since messages do need to be encrypted/decrypted by the owners of the messages, not the service. This friction is enough to keep casual users away.

On the flip-side, the expectation of these features and conveniences are built on the assumption that your data is up for grabs. Whatsapp and Facebook built their empire on data collection and now enjoy a huge advantage in revenue and manpower compared to incumbents like Signal. Those returns allowed them to hire huge teams and to build software that would take others much longer to make. Once you start worrying about data privacy and remove a centralized authority for the data (e.g. Facebook), everything becomes harder. If you can’t ask the server to send you a full chat history, then a typical SaaS problem becomes a complex security solution with more steps required to deliver the experience. Most things are still possible, but they take a bit longer to figure out and even more so for a smaller company with fewer resources.

My opinion is that we need to give these small companies a chance to catch up. It’s not fair to judge competing products at vastly different points in their lives. If we compare Signal to Messenger in its early days, it holds up fairly well. If Signal gets the attention and donations it critically needs, they will build features that capture our non-technical friends and family while still retaining their promises of privacy and security. With a bit of patience and an eye on the long-term, the benefits will surely outweigh the lack of sticker packs for a few years.