Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: ‘We took steps to protect our users’::Beeper, like Sunbird and Texts, sought to find a way to bring iMessage to Android users. Its app, Beeper Mini, worked well. But a few days after it launched, Apple took steps to shut it down.
Or Threema since it’s from my country and we have a good privacy reputation 🇨🇭
And it works really well and allows you to do what you need it to do of course.
The problem with Threema is it costs money.
It’s not a lot of money. It’s not an unfair price. It’s completely reasonable to expect to pay for services rather than using things that spy on you. None of that matters though. I have a hard enough time getting people to use Signal, which is free; anything paid is a complete nonstarter.
Yeah, ive used Threema and Matrix and neither competes with the ease of adoption that Signal has for normies
Yep.
Base usage must be free.
And that base needs to compete with everything else.
Maybe a paid tier for media beyond a certain size, say 50mb or 100mb, I don’t know. If I had to pay for being able to have 50mb attachments, I’d be willing to work to keep the sizes lower, helping reduce their costs. If I felt I needed the attachment size, say for work, then I could upgrade.
Or maybe a paid tier for self-hosting that can interconnect with the rest of Signal.
Hell, once I can start using Signal as my primary (or if they brought SMS back), I’d happily pay.
deleted
WhatsApp already had a very large userbase when in started charging, and IIRC only charged after the first year of use to better hook people. Given its dominance in certain markets (Europe comes to mind), WhatsApp could probably succeed with a paid model even today, but something with a tiny userbase isn’t going to grow that way.