zlacker

>>mikece+(OP)
Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification.

It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget.

If Signal staff are reading this, I'd gladly pay $100/year for a phone-free solution for all users.

>>jph+e7
The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless.

You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.

>>zamale+la
Using phone numbers as identifiers (and by extension users' phone books as a contact discovery mechanism) is probably at least equally significant as a factor for WhatsApp's success.