So it's been about three and a half weeks since I actually did it and deleted WhatsApp off my phone. Not fully, if I'm honest, it's still installed on my old phone that lives in a drawer for the two group chats I haven't managed to fully migrate. But my main phone runs Signal now, and I want to write down what that's actually been like, because the coverage of this whole thing has mostly been "everyone is switching to Signal!" without anyone saying what happens after you switch.
Quick recap for anyone who missed early January: WhatsApp pushed out an in-app notice about updated terms of service, people (reasonably or not) freaked out about data sharing with Facebook, and Elon Musk tweeted "Use Signal" on January 7th to his however-many-million followers, which sent Signal's servers into a tailspin. I remember trying to verify my number that week and getting an SMS code that took eleven minutes to arrive. Sensor Tower numbers floating around put Signal's new downloads somewhere north of 7 million in that first week alone, which for an app that had been a niche security-nerd thing for years is kind of wild. Telegram had its own moment too, Pavel Durov posted on January 12th that they'd crossed 500 million monthly active users. WhatsApp eventually backed off and pushed the enforcement date for the new terms from February 8th out to May 15th, which if you ask me was the actual smart move and should've been the first move, not the third.
Anyway. I jumped ship in mid-January, mostly out of stubbornness at that point more than genuine privacy panic. Here's what nobody mentioned in any of the "how to switch" posts I read:
There's no import tool. None. You cannot bring your WhatsApp chat history into Signal. Every group chat I care about, I had to recreate from scratch, which means manually adding each person, which means half of them didn't have Signal installed yet, which means sending the same "hey I'm on Signal now, download this" message into four different group chats over the course of a week. My dad still hasn't installed it. My cousin's family group is still 100% on WhatsApp because convincing seven people over 50 to install a new app is a genuinely miserable task and I gave up around attempt three.
The desktop app is fine but weirdly fussy about your phone staying connected. If my phone's been off wifi for a while the desktop client just sits there with messages not syncing and no obvious indicator why. Small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that makes you go back to the old app out of pure friction avoidance.
You end up running both apps anyway. This is the part that actually annoys me. The whole point was supposedly to leave WhatsApp behind, and three and a half weeks in I still have it open because that's where my actual social graph lives. Signal is great for the five or six people I message the most and who also made the switch. Everyone else, I'm still on WhatsApp. So functionally I've just added an app to my phone rather than replacing one, which is not exactly the outcome I was promised by the tech press in early January.
None of this means I'm switching back, to be clear. I like Signal. I like that disappearing messages are built in rather than bolted on, I like that the whole thing is open source and I can go read the protocol docs if I feel like torturing myself on a Tuesday night. I just think the "everyone's leaving WhatsApp" narrative glossed over the fact that a messaging app is only useful if the people you talk to are on it, and getting your dad to install anything new is its own multi-week project independent of how good the app is.
Small unrelated aside because I can't not mention it: did anyone else notice Discord straight up pulled the plug on the WallStreetBets server this week, citing hateful content in the chat? Whatever you think about the GameStop stuff happening right now, watching a company that size flip a switch and mute a community of that size in an instant was a pretty stark reminder of how little any of us actually own the platforms we build communities on. Worth sitting with, separate from whatever happens to the stock price next week.
Anyway. Back to manually re-adding my group chats one person at a time.