Signal: Product review by Product Manager

Why Signal app when we have WhatsApp?

While there are plenty of chat apps and WhatsApp has become the de-facto standard. It’s hard for any other player to make an entry unless there is a substantial benefit. Signal has made “Privacy” their mantra to make the shift happen. A vast segment of people is getting privacy-aware, directly reflecting in an increase in Signal userbase. People have a lot to share, and a large portion of this is private sensitive info. People needed a proven, secure, reliable, and private way for communication, and Signal delivers it all. https://signal.org

Growing importance of privacy and users concerns

In the zest of improving user experience, providing personalized content, and rendering relevant ads, many companies have built sophisticated tools to track users’ online activity. Your every action is being recorded forever and used for machine-learning to provide context-aware information.

YouTube wants to provide videos of your interest. Amazon and shopping websites know what you have purchased and want to show products you might like. Google knows what you search for and use that to promote ads on its platform. More tech companies understand you; a detailed profile is created and used to target it against you for ads and products. People are getting aware of this as they experience it first hand. Movies like ‘Social Dilemma‘ take it further to showcase the reality with examples, mind-boggling.

Companies make you live in your own digital bubble

Google & Facebook are classic examples of this – They create a digital bubble around you so that you only see what you are interest in and nothing outside of that. They shield you from a lot of things that you possibly should be aware of. All of this is done based on your data, your interest. All this to promote ads and products from these companies. Avoid getting conditioned by tech companies.

Amount of Data captured by Signal, iMessages, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger. A differentiator for Signal

The image below comes from 9to5Mac and shows the privacy labels of several chat apps you might have on your phone, including Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, as seen below.

Peoples concerns over recent Facebook & WhatsApp policy

Facebook & WhatsApp’s new privacy policy triggered the spark for people to move to Signal. While many people do not really understand the privacy terms, there have been a lot of memes that got circulated, which flocked the users to Signal. A picture is worth a thousand words –

Privacy & Simplicity – Key differentiators

The core benefit that Signal brings is ‘Privacy’. Apart from this, they have done a fantastic job of keeping the user experience minimal and clear. No fancy features, nothing apart from chat/calls/communication, no payment, no ads, just bliss.

No Ads, No trackers, No kidding – Key differentiator

Signal promises no nagging ads and trackers which is the key for privacy. And its free!

Signal at par with the competition

Using Signal for a week or so and reviewing its feature-set, there is nothing that it lacks. It is competitive to beat WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, and iMessages. Around 45+ small & big features, give people everything that they want to do with a chat app. With Signals one big benefit of ‘Privacy’ and being competitive with all other features, Signal is competing strongly against the well knows apps.

Actively listening to users request

Signal’s founders observed the trend and listened to users carefully to build it. They realized that what WhatsApp/Facebook is doing is not right for users in the long term and wanted to build an alternative that people can rely on for a long time. Reading a few articles on Signal and the team, they are actively listening to users and building what people need.

Targeting India as one of the biggest market – 400M WhatsApp users in India

Focusing where it matters the most. Signal is targetting user-base of 400M users in India who are active on WhatsApp. Supports 12 Indian languages – Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi and more. They are actively listening for new feature request from Indian to build the best chat app.

If you build for India,you build for the world.
Brian Acton – Signal founder

Open source model – Code is open for audits and continuous improvements

Complete source code of Signal app on GitHub. Anyone can look at it to review privacy and security considerations and suggest improvements. With a Linux operating system, we have seen a massive advantage that Open Source has brought to make it the world’s best operating system. Thousands of Software Developers & Cyber Security experts worldwide can review the code and find out the bugs/improvements. As these bugs get fixed, and we all benefit from the best chat app that is secure and private.

People behind Signal are the same people who founded WhatsApp!

Brain Acton who founded WhatsApp and sold it to Facebook in 2014, has founded the Signal app. Brains is a privacy advocate and has criticized Facebook for using data for monetization. Brian left WhatsApp in 2017 due to a dispute over using WhatsApp data for monetization. Brain started Signal in 2018 as a non-profit organization, with his own $50M investment to provide secure and private chat messenger. Brain and team are the domain experts, and that helps them stand strong against the competition.

Business model: Non-profit org based on donations, similar to Wikipedia

The Signal is an independent non-profit organization like Wikipedia. They aren’t tied to any tech companies and won’t be acquired by anyone. They do not have any investment plans and want to run the company using the donations they receive. The signal does not want to show any ads or leverage data for a business model. A lot of people, including Elon Musk, have donated for Signal. As a user, we all can make small/large donations to keep it running for our own benefits.

Signal provides Software libraries for developers to extend the support

Signal has provided software libraries for developers worldwide to extend Signal to various form factors. We will clearly see it coming for business, or browsers, or any other interaction model. Maybe your devices can be controlled using the Signal chat app :).