Facebook is breaking promises about WhatsApp, as expected. Learn how to tell if your next messaging app is going to last or will eventually become horrible just like the others.
The trend today has been to stop using WhatsApp ever since the policy was updated to allow sharing your personal information with Facebook. Some are recommending switching to other centralized messaging systems like Signal or Telegram, but there’s a problem with that too. Read on to learn how to recognize when a messaging app is out to profit off of and control you versus enabling better communications between people. Personally, I specifically never became dependent on WhatsApp because 10 years ago I knew something like this would happen eventually. I mean the clues are pretty obvious; it’s a closed system, every app has to connect to the same centralized servers, it requires your phone number… it was clearly designed from the beginning to: Embarrassingly, hundreds of millions of people keep falling for this scheme. I hear that in some countries, people even do business through WhatsApp. Switching to another messaging service might seem like the solution to Facebook’s monetization of your privacy, but be careful as you’re probably just trading one dictatorship for another dictatorship. Maybe the new dictator seems like a better dictator? Pavel Duroc, the founder, and chief of Telegram may say things like “respect users”, but how long is that going to last? Whatsapp’s founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton were originally good dictators who respected users, too. They even promised to protect user data after the Facebook acquisition! That didn’t last very long now, did it? Why is it so easy to predict that all of these internet messaging apps aren’t going to last? It’s because none of the other practically exact same messaging apps have lasted. All of them do very similar things and generally fail the same way. Let’s look at a few: ICQ AIM MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Live Messenger Yahoo Messenger Skype Facebook Messenger WhatsApp Anything Google (Sorry I don’t have time to list all of the failed Google messaging apps) Today we have dozens and dozens more internet messaging apps/services, and just about all are repeating the same mistakes of the ones that have failed. Personally, I’m getting pretty tired of recommending instant messaging apps to friends and family or coworkers only for them to eventually become awful or shut down. That appears to be how things go. Will Signal or Telegram ever become awful or shut down? Probably! Both actually promote an open-source nature whereas the code for the Telegram client is completely open to forking and both the Signal server and client are open source.
