Here in South Europe people mostly use Viber. Edit: I was very unaware about situation in Southern Europe as I’ve learned from this post… Most people in Croatia use Viber!
I like the fact that my messages are on in sync on all my devices. Yeah, it’s not E2E, but it’s good enough for just chatting with friends and family. I like how easy it is to send photos on it. Also being able to edit messages is nice for when you fat finger stuff.
And yeah, SimpleX seems like some spy level shit, neat though. I used Signal for a few years, back when it had SMS support.
Signal does stay in sync between my laptop and phone, but I think if I wanted more than that it would not be easy to achieve. Message editing was added in a recent update, and it seems to be as easy to send photos via Signal as any other messaging app (I can’t remember if it was ever difficult).
I’ve become more insistent about E2EE for anything I rely on lately because big platforms have been scanning “private” conversations for content some computer program guesses violates their policies. Someone I know recently got a suspension from Facebook (yes, they’re probably worse than other platforms) for a joke sent to a friend in chat years prior. That took it from an abstract they could to a concrete they do.
No doubt they’re the worst, but will Discord do the same thing? I wouldn’t be shocked. Will Telegram? If they get enough pressure from governments because of people talking about doing bad things over Telegram, they probably will.
So now if I’m using anything that isn’t E2EE, I find myself thinking about whether dark humor or hypothetical self defense scenarios will get my flagged by some algorithm. People act differently when they’re being watched.
