We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
I don’t care if employees are well paid. I do care that Signal takes 50 employees to operate. What are they all doing? This is a genuine question
You did not read the article, did you?
This is a lot of work, and we do it with a small and mighty team. In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal, a number that is shockingly small by industry standards. For example, LINE Corporation, the developers of the LINE messaging app popular in Japan, has around 3,100 employees, while the division of Kakao Corp that develops KakaoTalk, a messaging app popular in Korea, has around 4,000 employees. Employee counts at bigger corporations like Malus, Meta, and Google’s parent company (Alphabet) are much, much higher.
I can’t speak for LINE - But Kakao does a heck of a lot more than messaging; it’s one of the top companies to work for and the defacto app of Korea. It’s used for taxis, webtoons, payments, music streaming, banking, social media, OAuth, etc (and that’s on top of all its failed ventures no one uses). So yeah, it makes sense to have a lot more employees. Getting into Kakao is like getting into Google or Apple in the West.
It also doesn’t explain why Signal has 50. Signal is open source, but openly hostile to forks which throttles its development. So I wonder, what are those 50 employees doing? I genuinely would like to see a breakdown
Yeah it’s the hostility to forks and federation I genuinely don’t like. Federation is important, and forks are important so I can use the service as I wish, not as they wish me to.
Of course it’s a market and I can vote with my feet and I have. I just linked it to Matrix for availability but I don’t actively use it from my end. And I have a grand total of 1 person regularly communicating with me through it :P Versus about 50 on whatsapp and another 50 on telegram (not to mention the countless telegram groups I’m in). But they all end up in one and the same matrix for me <3
Self-hosting all these bridges used to be a royal PITA but there’s some very kind people that made this amazing ansible playbook that takes care of it all now.
You didn’t read their question, did you? Because your quote does not answer it.
Worth mentioning, as someone has for Kakao below, the LINE app has a magnitude or two or three more features than Signal. Beyond chat, the app handles payments including retail via QR, effectively has Instagram and TikTok built in, has an entire news section, and much more.
Heck, LINE the company even has permanent and pop-up merchandise stores in downtown Tokyo (Harajuku) and their own MVNO mobile carrier called LINE Mobile.
Now that said, I loathe LINE, the app. The UX is poor and the app is bloated behind belief. Only use it effectively out of necessity as someone living in Japan. The only alternative communications channel even remotely close in usage is probably Instagram chat.
When Whatsapp was sold to Facebook in 2014, they had 55 employees. Considering the app had considerably less features and did not focus so heavily on encryption and privacy, Signal can be considered even leaner than Whatsapp.
Now, for the actual breakdown, they have at least the following technical teams: desktop, android, iOS, server, calls (ringrtc), core (libsignal). If we assume a team has usually 5 people (manager, Sr SWE, Jr SWE, QA, maybe PM), that’s already 30 people. On top of that, they have an in house support team (don’t know the size but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have 10ppl on the payroll considering the number of signal users) and management (CEO, CTO, CSO, VP), which will quickly add up to around 50.
