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WhatsApp is the world’s leading secure messaging platform – but it now finds itself playing catch-up with competing fast competitors. As good and as popular as the Facebook-owned platform may be, it still has not accessed multi-device in a meaningful way and that is soon becoming a serious issue. It’s also a problem exacerbated by the rapid convergence of messaging and chatting – and with WhatsApp chats still tied to a phone, instead of an easier-to-use large-screen device, it’s becoming a major obstacle.
Facebook has solved this problem with its cross-platform Messenger Rooms – and is taking the fight to Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. But those rooms do not offer end-to-end encryption, and this is Facebook we’m talking about – it would not be my first choice for person-to-person or group voice or video calls about anything sensitive or confidential.
WhatsApp does a brilliant job of securing voice and video calls from its iPhone and Android apps – and has recently increased this to enable eight-party calling. All calls are secured with end-to-end encryption. The great news is that WhatsApp now has a full desktop app in the works – part of a feature of a paired devices now in test, and it has been reported that desktops based on conversations will be enabled.
But now the best and brightest alternative to WhatsApp has beaten the Facebook-owned platform to the punch. Uber-Safe Signal has begun beta testing of new one-on-one video and voice calls from its brilliant desktop app. And while this is not yet available for group calls, there’s a hint in Signal’s announcement that it has this in mind. “We think conversations should zoom in from the past and into the future,” it says in a blog post that takes a dig at Zoom, “and your feedback will help us do that.”
Just like WhatsApp has Signal Zoom in mind because the market leader has group video calls in a daily option / slip (delete as appropriate) for millions of us, both in our work and personal lives. “This release is one of the first steps toward our goal of enabling secure voice and video calls that are available on all of your devices,” says Signal, before taking a further pop up at Zoom’s past misunderstandings about encryption and some functionality limited to paying users, “Besides being end-to-end encrypted and free for anyone to use.”
Despite the digs at Zoom, this is not really the competition – this is all about WhatsApp. Signal is by far the best secure messenger available today, and for anyone who does not trust Facebook with their messaging, this is the option for you. Signal has only two disadvantages compared to WhatsApp. The first is that there are not enough users yet – tens of millions versus a few billion. The second is that there are no backups, as such. If you lose your device, you will lose messages.
As for the installation base, Signal is growing rapidly – driven by the drive for safety and its inclusion during recent protests in the US and Hong Kong, where it was seen as the best, safest messenger for anyone concerned about interception, metadata or tracking. WhatsApp’s own encryption is built on Signal’s open source protocol, although Signal keeps its efforts transparent so that it can be checked by third parties for vulnerabilities, not WhatsApp.
Back to the second issue, backups: signal does lets users transfer message history to a new device, and it preserves an independent message history on each paired device – though only from when the device is paired, nothing is transferred in advance. But if you lose your primary device, you will have to restart.
While WhatsApp enables chat and media backups, these are currently stored in Apple as Google’s cloud with no end-to-end encryption. This means that users lose the protection that has become the primary calling card of WhatsApp when they back up. This is another issue that WhatsApp is reporting for a future release.
Desktop call is not the only update that Signal has in the works. The platform also introduces messaging requests, which allow users to control who they can message on the platform from outside the contacts of their device. The need for this was driven in part by the rise of Signal. With more users joining, the chance of unwanted messages increases. Now that is being addressed.
WhatsApp has been leaking exciting updates through hidden code in new releases for months now – but Signal is chasing its users and is one step ahead. We need some of these WhatsApp updates on our devices in short order. In particular, we need end-to-end encrypted backups and linked devices, more than animated stickers and QR codes. The competition does not hang around, and Signal becomes the millionaire of choice for choice.
If you have not yet used Signal, I strongly recommend that you install it on your phone and check it.
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