Exactly. I have Signal installed, but none of my contacts have it installed on their phones.
And Signal's "helpful" banner at the top that allows easy invitation of contacts will (rightly) be treated as spam by most of my contacts - these secure/encrypted chat apps keep coming and going, with some people saying "just use Whatsapp, it is now encrypted", others complaining that it is closed source, etc. I can't keep changing my recommendations every few months and expect my contacts to do the same. In fact, it is only through hn that I even heard of yet another protocol: https://matrix.org/.
Practically speaking, WhatsApp works best wrt security for me due to these network issues - essentially all of my Indian contacts have it for some reason, likely again some positive feedback loop due to network effects in India. And there is no such dominant app among my US contacts, hence I fall back to plain old SMS.
And Signal's "helpful" banner at the top that allows easy invitation of contacts will (rightly) be treated as spam by most of my contacts - these secure/encrypted chat apps keep coming and going, with some people saying "just use Whatsapp, it is now encrypted", others complaining that it is closed source, etc. I can't keep changing my recommendations every few months and expect my contacts to do the same. In fact, it is only through hn that I even heard of yet another protocol: https://matrix.org/.
Practically speaking, WhatsApp works best wrt security for me due to these network issues - essentially all of my Indian contacts have it for some reason, likely again some positive feedback loop due to network effects in India. And there is no such dominant app among my US contacts, hence I fall back to plain old SMS.